Here’s a double shot of Recommended Reading courtesy of Granta: Open City author Teju Cole on going blind, and Book of Clouds author Chloe Aridjis on Soviet-era cosmonauts.
Double Shot of Granta
Tuesday Means New Releases
Sometime Millions contributor Elif Batuman sees her debut effort The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them hit shelves today. Also new today is Not Art by Peter Esterhazy who wowed Garth at PEN/World Voices in 2008.
Another Southern Girl
Is it another Beyoncé/Lemonade thinkpiece? Yes. Is it also more than that and worth your time to read? Yes. Terryn Hall at The Rumpus on Beyoncé, Erykah Badu, and being a black woman in the South: “Although Beyoncé is not ‘literary’ in a traditional sense, she’s using her power to usher in new black poetic (Warsan Shire) musical (Ibeyi, Chloe and Halley Bailey) and modeling (Jourdan Dunn, Zendaya) talent in a manner similar to that of the literary patrons of yesteryear.”
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On the State of Syrian Publishing
The Syrian publishing industry is but one of the casualties in the nation’s ongoing civil war. “The whole of publishing is not more than 10 percent of what it was in the past,” says Samer al-Kadri who runs Bright Fingers Publishing House in Damascus.
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Dear Diary
“Despite its brevity, the diary is an illuminating document that offers a glimpse into the mind of the artist as a young woman.” The never-before-seen diary of Flannery O’Connor has been published in Image, an arts and faith quarterly, and reveals the shadow of the writer she would become. See also: our own Nick Ripatrazone on teaching O’Connor.
Let’s Write About Sex, Baby!
Authors, are you struggling to get your book’s characters together? Are they lacking a little spark, a little intimacy? Well, have no fear. The folks at Open Road Media put together a video with Erica Jong, Lawrence Block, Patricia Gaffney, and a few more authors on The Art of Writing Sex Scenes. This should do the trick.
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The Books That Break Reading Slumps
Michael Seidlinger asks authors about the books and writers that got them out of particularly tough reading slumps.
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