“Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.” The Rumpus interviews Lauren Groff, who’s a bit of a Millions favorite. Here’s her Millions interview and here’s Arcadia as Janet Potter’s Staff Pick this past April. Also, here’s a #LitBeat of a Literary Death Match she competed in earlier this year, in LA.
“Research is about following the gleam into the dark.”
Football Book Club: Steven Millhauser’s ‘Edwin Mullhouse’
This week, Football Book Club will be reading Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse, as well as posting essays about Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright, lamenting the awful truth about life without the NFL, and probably marveling at the insanity of L. Ron Hubbard.
Google Map Tourism
Google Maps now allows users to take 3D photo tours of more than 15,000 popular sites around the world. Here’s Yosemite’s Half Dome, and here’s Trevi Fountain.
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“His parents were like, ‘Robert!’ / His friends were like, ‘Bob?'”
Kick off your Monday morning with this Aaron Belz poem honoring Evel Knievel, you daredevil, you.
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Peter Matthiessen to Publish New Novel
Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen will publish a new novel in the spring of next year. Matthiessen, who won the National Book Award in 2008 for his last novel, Shadow Country, said the new novel centers on “a weeklong meditation retreat at the site of a World War II concentration camp.”
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Too Long Didn’t Read
Going to SXSW this year? Be sure to check out the “Too Long, Didn’t Read” panel our own C. Max Magee is sharing with Bygone Bureau editor Kevin Nguyen and The Morning News co-founder Andrew Womack. The Saturday panel will focus on the “renaissance of long-form writing,” and location details can be found here.
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The Virtues of Boring
Mark O’Connell’s recent essay in these pages discussed how long, challenging novels can hold you captive (in both the good and bad senses of that phrase). Now, in the Times, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott come to the defense of “the slow and the boring” in film, responding Dan Kois’s Times Magazine piece confessing he’s “suffering from a kind of culture fatigue and have less interest in eating my cultural vegetables.”