Jesse Bering on his incredibly inelegant first time writing about sex. Cf. his most recent adventures of writing about sex, his new book Why is the Penis Shaped Like That?.
A Not so Steamy First Time
Sticks and Stones
As a child, Xiaolu Guo hunted birds and toads to survive. Now, as a writer in Britain, she’s written a memoir about her difficult childhood, which you can read more about in this review in The New Statesman. Sample quote: “Perhaps it is no coincidence that the reason that Guo gives for deciding to write in English is to be free of Chinese government censorship, a process that she describes as the wearing down of a rock’s sharp edges to a smooth pebble.”
The Teen Whisperer
“When John Green told the crowd that, though he was proud of the movie, it wasn’t his movie, someone shouted, ‘But it’s your plot, John!’—which marked the first time I’d ever heard heckling about the nature of authorship.” Green, author of YA bestseller The Fault in Our Stars, is the literary hero of teenage girls, and nerdfighter hero to millions. After you read the excellent profile at The New Yorker, consider the The Millions’ own review.
Something Simple
“When I want to be ambushed, captured, thrust into a strange and vivid world, and tossed aloft until I cannot stand it, until everything is at stake and life feels almost unbearably vivid, I do something simple. I read short stories.” Electric Literature has posted Ben Marcus‘s “paean to the contemporary American short story,” which doubles as the introduction to New American Stories and does a pretty good job of capturing just what it is we love about reading fiction.
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On Miss Lora
The New Yorker‘s Book Bench talked with Junot Díaz about “Miss Lora,” his story about an illegal liaison between a boy and much older woman published in the magazine this week.
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