Don DeLillo spoke in Chicago last week, after receiving the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Adam Daniels, our intrepid #LitBeat correspondent, reports.
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A Foreign Body within Oneself
Over at the Masters Review, Marjorie Sandor writes about the uncanny in literature and film, the origins of the word, and psychology. “Uncanny. Look it up in a standard collegiate dictionary, and you’ll get a brief, unhelpful definition. Seemingly supernatural. Mysterious. [orig. Sc & N. Engl.]. But the slippage has already begun. Seemingly.”
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Is That a Manuscript in Your Pants, or…?
“Success in writing takes serious commitment and a willingness to devote thousands of hours to the craft of having sex with key publishing professionals.”
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A Chance for Closure
E. V. De Cleyre explores the right moment to end a nonfiction story. She writes that life rarely offers conclusions, and “dealing with actual occurrences often means there is no definitive end, and even if there were (such as a death), there comes the aftermath—the grief, the coping, the rebuilding.” Pair with Sonya Chung’s Millions essay on literary endings.
China Miéville Interviewed by BLDGBLOG
BLDGBLOG, which has “always been interested in learning how novelists see the city,” interviewed China Miéville about “the conceptual origins of the divided city featured in his… award-winning novel The City & The City,” among other things. Architects, fans of urban decay, and general lit nerds are going to have a field day with this link, I promise you.
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The Muse of Impossibility
“[T]he use of similes and metaphors confesses the defeat of language: we must compare because we cannot say.” -From Alberto Manguel’s stunning essay “The Muse of Impossibility” in The Threepenny Review. (via The Rumpus)
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Illustrating Riverrun
In his ongoing efforts to accomplish the impossible, the artist Jason Novak has drawn Finnegans Wake.
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