Tim Parks takes a look at recent literary history and sincerely asks, does money make us write better? Supplementary reading: Nick Ripatrazone’s look into the economy of literary magazines.
Words for Cash
RIP E.L. Doctorow
E.L. Doctorow, the renowned novelist and fiction writer best known for books including Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and the National Book Award-winning World’s Fair, passed away in Manhattan last night at the age of 84. You could read one of our numerous pieces about his work if you’d like to look back on his life and career.
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Claire Vaye Watkins Takes Home the Dylan Thomas Prize
Kudos to Claire Vaye Watkins for taking home the Dylan Thomas Prize! Worth £30,000, the prize went to Watkins because, in the words of of the chair of the judging panel, she possesses “some of Dylan Thomas’s extraordinary skill in the short story form.” (Read more about Watkins’s work in Geoff Mak’s review of her 2012 book Battleborn.)
Chris Adrian’s Take on Shakespeare
Chris Adrian‘s pedigree is impressive: former Harvard Divinity student; Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate; current fellow in UCSF’s pediatric hematology/oncology department; lifelong fan of Shakespeare. He’s also found time to appear in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and McSweeney’s. Great Night, his latest novel, imaginatively reboots A Midsummer Night’s Dream by setting it in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. Here’s some footage of him reading an excerpt at last month’s FSG Reading Series.
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E is for Edward who mailed you some art
How jazzed would you be if you received mail in one of Edward Gorey‘s illustrated envelopes?
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Melancholy Maurice Sendak Speaks
Where the Wild Things Are author/illustrator Maurice Sendak, 82, wistfully reflects on age, love, and mortality in this interview, after a mural he painted in New York was restored and moved to the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia. (via @BookBench)
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Still not bleak house.
Laura Miller wants us all to stop calling The Wire a Victorian novel, because it is in fact a television drama.
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“Let the Games Begin,” as Bane Would Say
The Olympics Opening Ceremony this year sure was… something. Thankfully, folks more eloquent than I are here to parse its craziness for us: Jenny Diski and Rafil Kroll-Zaidi on what it was, plus Alex Shephard and the Full Stop bunch on what it should have been.
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