DeAndre McCullough died last week at the age of 35. McCullough was famously portrayed as the young protagonist in David Simon and Edward Burns’s book The Corner, which went on to become its own HBO miniseries. The Wire later adopted aspects from both the book and the miniseries. The obituary Simon wrote is not to be missed.
DeAndre McCullough Dies
Writing For Your Life
“I think essay and memoir hang together in a balance. There’s any number of ways to strike it, but from Montaigne on down that balance seems key to their design.” The Paris Review interviews the essayist Michelle Orange, author of the recent This Is Running For Your Life.
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Masthead Revisited
“This is a story about a woman who was erased from her job as the editor of the most famous literary magazine in America.” For Longreads, A.N. Devers writes about Brigid Hughes, the second editor of The Paris Review, who has been all but scrubbed from the magazine’s history. See also: Dever’s 2011 Year in Reading entry.
The Southern Review’s New Digs
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Den Father
By now the overlap between writers and drug addicts is pretty well-known, but it wasn’t so well-known back when Thomas De Quincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater. In the essay, De Quincey admitted that not only was he addicted to opium, he suspected he’d ingested more of the substance than any other man save Coleridge. (Incidentally, we reviewed a novel by Year in Reading alumnus Jeet Thayil that largely took place in an opium den.)
An Irish Books Mule
Anne Enright remarks on Irish censorship, and she recalls the time her own mother was used “as a books mule.”
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Tuesday Links
Clusty has unveiled a very cool Shakespeare search engine, allowing one to sift through all the bard’s works with the push of a button.The Washington Post is hosting live lunchtime chats with various authors over the next two weeks to coincide with the 2006 National Book Festival. The highlight: Geraldine Brooks, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The March on Thursday.Just announced: Another Hannibal book from Thomas Harris called Hannibal Rising, prompting Ed to call Harris “The Laziest Titler in the Publishing Industry.”
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