Pulphead author John Jeremiah Sullivan writes his second New York Times Magazine cover story in five weeks. This is turning into an embarrassment of riches.
John Jeremiah Sullivan Visits Cuba
Is there a rising star among you?
The Ashmead Award is presently accepting nominations, so if you know an exceptional young editor it may be time to break out the letterhead.
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An Amis For Us All
If this was the Summer of Martin Amis (which seems to have been the case), then prepare yourselves for the coming Fall of Kingsley Amis, courtesy of the folks at the New York Review of Books Classics and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Stories Are Clumsy Beasts
Over at ZYZZYVA, Christian Kiefer talks to playwright Octavio Solis and novelist Scott Hutchins about the craft of writing and the difference between writing plays and writing novels. “It takes a huge amount of hard labor, man, to harness the forces that we are using to make our stories. They may emerge whole cloth out of our need to know how we operate as humans, but they’re often clumsy unfinished beasts." Kiefer’s new novel, The Animals, is one of the most anticipated books of 2015.
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The New Great Books
"How can we represent four hundred years of American literary history in a way that doesn’t reinforce the unfortunate hierarchies of those four hundred years?" Year in Reading alum Rebecca Makkai writes for Electric Literature about the opening of the new American Writers Museum in Chicago and what it means to curate an historical canon of letters. See also: our interview with Makkai from a couple of years back.
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Elliott Holt Talks Anton Chekhov
“On the surface ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ is a love story,” writes Elliott Holt in a blog post for The Missouri Review. “[It’s] a romantic one at that, but it’s also about the tension between the person we show the world and the one we keep to ourselves. The older I get, the more the story resonates with me.”
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100 Plays for the First (Trump) Hundred Days
Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a play every day during Trump's first 100 days as president which will be published next year as 100 Plays for the First Hundred Days. She talks to American Theatre about why she decided to undertake such a project, how difficult the process was and the importance of showing up and being present. Includes excerpts from the book.
Storytelling in the Age of Twitter
Rita J. King investigates the ways storytelling is being influenced by Twitter. Indeed, she writes that “every five days, a billion tiny stories are generated by people around the world … [and] the tweets are being archived by the Library of Congress as part of the organization’s mission to tell the story of America.”