Over at the LARB blog, Lee Konstantinou is heading up a summer reading group for William Gaddis’s J R. To participate, just tag your tweets or Tumblr posts #OccupyGaddis.
#OccupyGaddis
Longreads
This January, Penguin Random House, Goodreads, Mashable and the National Book Foundation are sponsoring National Readathon Day, a holiday which encourages Americans to join together for a marathon reading session. If you’d like to take part, you can start a fundraiser to help support reading education, or else enlist your friends and family to read with you on January 24th from noon to 4 p.m.
Disaster!
As part of their ongoing effort to steer folks away from bad journalism, the folks at The Morning News are running a series on reading news wisely. This week, Brendan Fitzgerald takes a look at misleading headlines, urging readers to “let headlines pique your curiosity, but be sure journalists deliver.”
A Model of Quiet Dissent
“Born Guan Moye, he chose his pen name—“Don’t Talk”—to honor his mother’s caution against talking too much and in sardonic recognition of his failure to heed her warning. Yet I have been struck by his quiet and unassuming presence at literary conferences in Beijing, where he offered kind encouragement in private meetings but evinced a shy persona in public.” On the contradictions of last year’s Nobel laureate, Mo Yan.
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BOMB’s Biennial Fiction Content
Have a short story manuscript and you're not sure where to send it? BOMB Magazine's Biennial Fiction Contest, judged by Sheila Heti (who wrote How Should a Person Be? and was interviewed by The Millions here), is accepting submissions until the end of the month.
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A Boor
Recommended Reading: This primer on how to explain without mansplaining.
Smoking Knausgaard
"[E]ach video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria." The Paris Review has a new video series called "My First Time," in which big-name authors talk about getting their start. Helen DeWitt, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sheila Heti, a chain-smoking Karl Ove Knausgaard – what more could anyone want? More origin stories, that's what! Six writers – Colum McCann, Alexander Chee, Jami Attenberg, Emily St. John Mandel, Justin Taylor, and Anthony Marra – look back on their first books for us.