My piece in memory of novelist and rapier-tongued pundit Gore Vidal, who died Tuesday, appears on Prospero, the online arts & culture publication of The Economist.
Appearing Elsewhere
Tuesday New Release Day: Gay; LaValle; Beattie; Everett; Jaswal; Hamilton; Cole
Out this week: Hunger by Roxane Gay; The Changeling by Victor LaValle; The Accomplished Guest by Ann Beattie; So Much Blue by Percival Everett; Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal; The City Always Wins by Omar Robert Hamilton; and Blind Spot by Teju Cole. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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It’s Not Nothing
We’ve published a fair number of essays about the writing process and its discontents. In Bookforum, Anne Boyer tackles the natural complement to literary work, in an excerpt of her new Garments Against Women. Her subject? The art of not writing.
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Freeplay
StoryBundle, a new service that lets you pay as much (or as little) as you want for preselected bundles of ebooks, announced on Wednesday that their latest bundle is a collection of writing about video games. Among other things, it includes two books by Jordan Mechner, the man behind Prince of Persia, as well as two issues of Kill Screen.
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Tenure Track
“One hears, in the news, that one new fad after another is sweeping the academy. World literature, digital humanities, book history, cognitive science. Perhaps everyone will just watch TV (there are twenty-seven panels on The Wire, and at least a paper, I recall, on Rizzoli and Isles, a TNT show)…The elephant in the room, or the one that has left the room a while ago (but whose stinking presence everyone still inhales deeply or holds their nose after), is Theory.” N + 1 reviews MLA 2013.
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The Artist’s Guide to Parenting
“The physical purpose of reproduction is, obviously, the continuation and renewal of genetic continuity, human survival. Its psychological purpose seems to me to be a particularly poignant kind of mutual learning and, matters being equal, ineffable comfort.” What is the relationship between being an artist and being a parent? Maria Popova at Brain Pickings takes a look at sculptor Anne Truitt’s collected journals, Daybook, to try and suss out an answer.
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“But I can tell you about my kitchen.”
At The Nervous Breakdown, Antonya Nelson interviews herself. She reveals why she writes stories, and describes her new novel, Bound, due out this fall.
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