Recommended Reading: Powell’s bookseller Kevin Sampsell’s piece about talking a customer out of committing suicide, only to then be plagued by the thought of killing himself afterward.
“I’m going to go jump off the Burnside Bridge”
Fear Factor
Colson Whitehead has some advice: write the book that "scares you shitless." In a recent, wide-ranging interview with John Freeman, the Underground Railroad author talks about why he wrote his latest novel, along with his methods for sussing out good ideas. You could also read our review of The Underground Railroad.
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Flame Throwers
"Try to imagine Hemingway telling Fitzgerald, 'My tailor flamed me on Amazon because I panned him on Yelp.'" Author D. Foy wrote a negative review of a tailor on Yelp, so the tailor threatened to pan his forthcoming book, Made to Break, on Amazon.
Utne Reader Controversy
The Utne Reader offices are moving from Minneapolis to Topeka, and the magazine's not taking any current employees with it.
Comma Confessional
"One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, Midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience. The popular image of the copy editor is of someone who favors rigid consistency. I don’t usually think of myself that way. But, when pressed, I do find I have strong views about commas." Mary Norris's "Confessions of a Comma Queen," from the New Yorker.
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My Many Selves
Recommended Reading: This incredible profile of Maggie Nelson by Hilton Als for The New Yorker. Nelson's The Red Parts saw a paperback reissue earlier this month.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Gaiman; Baxter; Morris; Hannah; Swanson; Cooper; Handler; Boyne; Duchovny; Link
Out this week: Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman; There’s Something I Want You to Do by Charles Baxter; Bon Appétempt by Amelia Morris; The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah; The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson; The Marauders by Tom Cooper; We Are Pirates by Daniel Handler; A History of Loneliness by John Boyne; Holy Cow by The X-Files star David Duchovny; and Get in Trouble by Kelly Link. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Loss in the Time of War
“War happens when words no longer work. Yet war is declared at the very point when words are at their most powerful. It’s an odd kind of paradox. In a time of war, the familiar words of your own language can become even more significant, as language is linked to the idea of home.” At JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu looks at trauma and language loss.
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7 reasons not to write a novel
Javier Marías cogently summarizes all the reasons to stop writing novels immediately, and adds only one reason to write them anyway: "Fiction is the most bearable of worlds." We reviewed The Infatuations, one of his own twelve works (to date), last year.
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