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”
I Choose Love
Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik has picked Nicole Krauss’s History of Love for the October selection of Book of the Month. You could also check out her Year in Reading in The Millions.
The Leonine Vladimir Sorokin
Now online: PEN World Voices video of Keith Gessen interviewing Vladimir Sorokin, author of the just-released Ice Trilogy and Day of the Oprichnik. I was a little nonplussed by the Times‘ decision to begin its profile of Sorokin with a discussion of his hair, but really…it is quite something. Come for the mane, stay for the acerbic insights.
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Basically, Salman Rushdie is the man.
“Writing’s too hard, and most of the time you feel dumb. It’s so difficult, you don’t have time to worry about being famous. That just seems like shit that happens outside.” Cheers to that, Salman Rushdie.
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Beautiful Sentence Diagrams
The idea of having to diagram a sentence still gives us nightmares, but Pop Chart Lab has diagrammed opening lines of famous novels, including those as simple as Slaughterhouse-Five and as complex as Don Quixote.
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