Taking its name from one of our heat-wave puns earlier this summer, the blog As I Lay Frying pairs literary quotes with pictures of doughnuts.
Dough Country For Old Men
“Deceptively spare”
“The art style also changes from chapter to chapter — some panels fill the pages to the edges and are overwhelming in their dark palette; some seem ordinary in proportion, confident; others fill the space around small figures with words, words, words; and others still have a minimalist, sketch-like quality and barely occupy the page at all — and they aren’t always chapters, or even stories, in the traditional sense.” On MariNaomi’s Dragon’s Breath and Other Stories.
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The Gifts of Workshop
A translation guide to writing workshops that we’re definitely printing out and bringing along to our next one. “Sometimes when people say ‘show, don’t tell,’ what they mean is that they find the characters sympathetic, the story is moving forward, and they even like the conflict, but they just don’t like the way you wrote it. What they’d really like to do is steal the idea and write it themselves, because honestly, they would do a much better job.”
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Lispector Inspector
The new issue of The New York Review of Books is out. A highlight, as usual, is Michael Wood, who does a better job than we did with Inherent Vice. But those of us on this side of the pay wall will have to make do with Lorrie Moore‘s intriguing essay on Clarice Lispector.
Big Fans
Chances are you know (and chances are you wonder why you know) that 50 Shades of Grey started out as a work of Twilight fanfiction. You probably harbor some deep suspicions about the value of fanfiction as a genre. But what if I were to tell you that the prototypical work of fanfiction is… The Gospels?
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Bio Unbound
At Salon, Cornel Bonca reviews Roth Unbound, a new “hybrid” biography of Roth that New Yorker staff writer Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote after months of interviews. Although the book glosses over Roth’s personal flaws, it gives a great overview of his work, Bonca writes.
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Dead Father
Recommended Reading: Susan Choi on a resurrected stage adaptation of Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White.
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