The Morning News has just launched a series on contemporary Russian literature. For this week’s installment Anna Starobinets provides an exerpt of her debut manuscript, An Awkward Age, and chats about her writing with Elizabeth Kiem. In the New Yorker, Sally McGrane profiles Boris Akunin, Russian writer of potboilers and political dissident.
This Week in Russian Lit.
The Partisan Review Archives
Recommended Reading, if you have the time: the full archives of the famed Partisan Review (published from 1934 to 2003) are now available online, searchable, and completely free. Essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews in the vault include work by Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Marge Piercy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roger Shattuck, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren. A worthy epitaph: "The Partisan Review is finished, but its vision has triumphed."
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Inspiration, Via Goat
Literary prizes are nothing new, but prizes that give writers real estate are a thoroughly modern development. At Salon, Michele Filgate investigates our odd new economy, in which lucky writers win leases to homes, inns and (in one case) a goat farm. You could also read our own Nick Ripatrazone on the Amtrak residency.
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All the Beginnings Have Endings
"Every story I have ever told has a kind of breach to it, I think. You could say that my writing isn’t quite right. That all the beginnings have endings in them." Lidia Yuknavitch, who recently published an essay, "There is No Map for Grief," in the Millions, now has an essay on violence, beauty and and storytelling in Guernica.
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“Swamp Fuschia”
Scandal at the Oxford English Dictionary! Robert Burchfield's efforts in the 70s and 80s to delete words from the dictionary based on their foreign origins have been uncovered.
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Short Form Story Contest
The Short Form is holding a short, short fiction contest, and the deadline is March 31st. Submit one or two stories no longer than 500 words for a shot at winning Frank Stanford’s Conditions Uncertain & Likely to Pass Away as well as internet stardom.