Director Ross Ching was so inspired by photographer Matt Logue’s “Empty LA” project, he decided to expand the idea. What’s resulted is the ongoing Empty America series, whose first two installments depict Seattle and San Francisco without any humans present. Coming up: Washington D.C. and New York City.
Empty America Series
Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists
Once a decade, Granta publishes a special “Best of Young American Novelists” issue featuring work from American fiction writers under the age of forty. The latest list includes Millions staffer and City on Fire author Garth Risk Hallberg, as well as Lauren Groff, Yaa Gyasi, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Claire Vaye Watkins, to name just a few. The issue will hit shelves on May 4th.
Flotsam and Jetsam
Check out some of the good stuff floating around:A bookstore on a boat at The CS MonitorSimilarties between David Mitchell's Number9Dream and Cloud Atlas at Conversational Reading.Tingle Alley discovers that Zadie Smith's hubby Nick Laird may be getting preferential treatment in the book pages.Aelfred of Dunwoody Recalls a Viking Incursion at Wal-Mart, 848 AD. You can't really beat this.
A Moving Image of A Moveable Feast
Actress Mariel Hemingway, granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, will be producing a film adaptation of A Moveable Feast, a memoir of Hemingway's early years as a writer in Paris. The essays feature a colorful cast of literary characters, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas.
●
●
Hope in the Dark
"Most of all, they don’t tell you that fear, to reverse a phrase from C. S. Lewis, will feel so like grief, and so you begin to mourn what you have not yet lost, because mourning prematurely is the only way to protect yourself from hope." For Catapult, Laura Turner writes about her trio of miscarriages and the hope she lost (and found) along the way. (Turner is a 2017 Year in Reading alum).
Life on Mars
"One of the advantages to being a novelist is removing oneself from the chatter of the fray and trying to get a read and a historical context on what’s happening in one’s own time." The Guardian interviews Rachel Kushner about women's prisons, remorse, and her new novel, The Mars Room. Pair with: our review calls Kushner's latest a "brutal, unforgiving, and often grimly funny tour de force of wasted lives."
Picturing Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was one of the first people to use photography to control meaning. Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American catalogues his many portraits and how they contributed to our perception of Douglass. Our own Edan Lepucki writes about the place of slave narratives in fiction.
●
●
Sullivan on Ska
Who invented ska music? John Jeremiah Sullivan traces the history of the genre in his latest essay for The Oxford American. "The more the claims for Rosco Gordon’s supremacy as a ska progenitor seem not out of proportion, and the less crazy it feels to say that, in a sense, ska was born in Tennessee." Pair with: Sullivan's essay on Bunny Wailer, who makes a cameo in his ska essay.
●
●
Everyone Has a Book in Their Stomach
Want to get your book published? Move to Iceland. One in ten Icelanders will become published authors, which isn't a big surprise because the country has a 99 percent literacy rate. Pair with: our essay on Icelandic writer Sjón.
●
●