Michael Chabon takes on Finnegans Wake in The New York Review of Books. This is mandatory reading, class.
“Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude…”
The 2017 Whiting Award Winners
The 2017 Whiting Award winners were announced tonight at a ceremony in Manhattan, and this year’s list of ten honorees includes Francisco Cantú (The Line Becomes a River), Simone Wright (Of Being Dispersed), Phillip B. Williams (Thief in the Interior), Kaitlyn Greenidge (We Love You, Charlie Freeman), Tony Tulathimutte (Private Citizens), Jen Beagin (Pretend I’m Dead), and Lisa Halliday (Asymmetry) as well as playwrights Clarence Coo, James Ijames, and Clare Barron. The award, which recognizes early-career writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, comes with a $50,000 prize. Excerpts from each writer’s work can be read at The Paris Review.
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Ta-Nahisi Coates’ bibliography
Earlier this month, Ta-Nahisi Coates published a conversation-changing long form article on race and reparations in The Atlantic (we covered other pundits’ responses here). Now, he is blogging a brief bibliography of the sources he consulted while writing that seminal essay. Parts one and two are available now, with two more installments planned for today and tomorrow. Whether or not you agree with Coates, it’s a fantastic reading list on race relations in America.
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Skip the Coffee
Do you need a pot of coffee before you dive into writing every day? You’re just procrastinating and making yourself less creative. Writer Merrill Markoe did the same thing until she discovered that working right after she wakes up leads to the best creative writing. “Words come pouring out easily while my head still feels as if it is full of ground fog, wrapped in flannel and gauze, and surrounded by a hive of humming, velvety sleep bees.”
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War Stories
Matthew Jakubowski writes an experimental review of the first English translation of Mercè Rodoreda’s final novel, War, So Much War. Pair with this excerpt from the novel, which appeared in the new issue of Harper’s.
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Thomas Pynchon to Publish New Novel
Washington Post critic Ron Charles broke the news today that Thomas Pynchon will have a new book out from Penguin this fall called Bleeding Edge. Charles said the news was confirmed by two Penguin employees and that “everything is tentative” at this time.
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Writing as Advocacy
“There’s this sense of guilt that my writing career is going well because black people are being killed. I’ve reached a point where I don’t know if I have anything new to say. It’s the same narrative over and over.” Debut novelist Brit Bennett gets profiled for The New York Times about The Mothers, which we included in the list of October book releases we’re most excited about.
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Imagine All the Islands
“It suddenly went off: ‘Oh, fuck, I’m going to try it as a novel, aren’t I?’ A terrifying realization because John Lennon is such an iconic figure—and the feeling I get out around there, this kind of eeriness, this kind of strange haunted reverberation. I mean, the fuckin’ Atlantic is a really weird thing to grow up right beside.” Millions staff writer Bill Morris sat down with Kevin Barry to talk about his new book, Beatlebone, and about the trouble of getting John Lennon’s voice right on the page. Morris has brought you a bit on Barry in the past.
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