Christopher Higgs was teaching Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps, and one of his students was inspired to make a mixtape featuring “the twisted, crusty, and often sublime characters found within the novel.” (The book, by the way, was one of my selections for Year in Reading last year.)
The Orange Eats Creeps Mixtape
Did We Mention That the Night Is Young?
The hard-partying New York Times had us seeing double this morning.
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Back Home
Sometimes, a writer needs to live in the setting of his or her fiction, as was the case with William Faulkner, who famously took a train from Hollywood to Mississippi solely to break through his writer’s block. Other times, they need to move away to find the inspiration to write about their home. In The Globe and Mail, Marsha Lederman writes about Emma Hooper, who credits her move to England with helping her write a novel set in her native Saskatchewan.
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BOMB’s Biennial Fiction Content
Have a short story manuscript and you’re not sure where to send it? BOMB Magazine‘s Biennial Fiction Contest, judged by Sheila Heti (who wrote How Should a Person Be? and was interviewed by The Millions here), is accepting submissions until the end of the month.
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On Hooliganism
“Soccer inspires passions that make fans do strange things, from the horrifying to the amusing.” Just in time for today’s game, our own Bill Morris writes about the World Cup, soccer hooliganism, and Bill Buford‘s Among the Thugs. Celebrate or mourn as you will, just please don’t start throwing beer bottles…
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World Literature Dispatches
Some world literature links: Sign and Sight offers the best introduction to Herta Müller I’ve been able to find…The Complete Review gets the ball rolling on Roberto Bolaño’s (very) early novel Monsieur Pain, forthcoming from New Directions…Ingo Schulze, author of the quietly astonishing New Lives and the forthcoming One More Story, talks to The Toronto Star (via)…The NBCC features Yu Hua‘s Brothers…Claudio Magris is crowned the king of Frankfurt…Maud Newton hails Juan Gabriel Vásquez‘s “inventive and intricately plotted” The Informers…The Brooklyn Rail and Transcript both offer handsome online digests of short stories from around the world.
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An Infinity in Reading
“Calling yourself depressed when you’re a writer seems so redundant.” On a year in reading Infinite Jest with Anna Fitzpatrick at Hazlitt. Be sure to check out the new fan-designed cover for the twentieth anniversary edition of the book.
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On Ebooks on the Cheap
Chad Post of Open Letter Books writes a compelling piece on the devaluing impact of ebook pricing, and why, despite that, Open Letter not only now offers ebooks, it put them all on sale for $4.99 for the month of June.
Weekend Links
Bat Segundo bags his biggest fish yet: John UpdikeOn their blog, the Freakonomics guys are looking for poker players to help them with an experiment, but the bigger news is that the post reveals a sequel to the bestseller is in the works.Part one of a interview with book designer Paul Buckley of Penguin Book Group – includes lots of examples of his work.John Batelle doesn’t mind that pirated copies of his book The Search are being sold on the streets of Mumbai.