Guernica has excerpted Harvey Pekar’s posthumous Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, which is out just today.
Harvey Pekar
An Interview With Marilynne Robinson
Read here, in the University of Washington's alumni magazine, about how Marilynne Robinson approaches a book's essence as "an elaborate needlepoint of decisions and observations"; how novels visit upon her as surprises; and how her recent move to New York might spawn yet another gift to readers.
●
●
“We love sentences and the people who create them.”
Christopher Newgent set up Vouched as a way to reinvigorate the book selling dynamic. By setting up guerrilla book stores and launching his Vouched Presents series, he's had some success. You can keep tabs on their Twitter account to see when they'll stop by your area.
●
●
“Refuge in the bottle and salvation on the page”
Olivia Laing has written an entire book about male writers and their relationships with alcohol, The Trip to Echo Spring, but in a piece for The Guardian she returns to the subject of writers and drink in order to respond to the question, what about women writers? Were any of them alcoholics? "Yes," she writes, "of course." She goes on to discuss the lives and work of Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, Elizabeth Bishop and Patricia Highsmith, their reasons for drinking and their experiences in a society much more willing to accept the struggles of men than of women. For more from Laing, be sure to check out her Year in Reading for 2013.
●
●
This is Your Brain on Austen
What does your brain look like when you read a Jane Austen novel? One group of Stanford researches is using an MRI machine to find out.
●
●
Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship
Submissions are open for the Oxford American's Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship, which awards a $10,000 living stipend, housing, and an editorial apprenticeship toward a nine-month residency with the magazine. The goal is to support the writing of a debut work of creative nonfiction, and the application deadline is midnight EST, March 30, 2017.