Last weekend The Southern Festival of Books took over Nashville. The latest installment of #LitBeat takes you to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s panel there, on the importance of studying–but not romanticizing–history.
The Southern Festival of Books
For the Imagination Impaired
If your ego is so large that it blots out your ability to identify with characters who don’t bear your own name U Star Novels offers a solution. The company will replace the names of characters in famous novels with those of your family and friends.
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The Future of the Post-Apocalyptic
“Post-apocalyptic books are thriving for a simple reason: The world feels more precariously perched on the lip of the abyss than ever, and facing those fears through fiction helps us deal with it.” A look at the future of post-apocalyptic fiction from NPR, with a mention of our own Emily St. John Mandel‘s Station Eleven.
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Lethem on Dyer
Jonathan Lethem‘s profile of Geoff Dyer for BOMB Magazine is available online for a limited time only.
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Writerly Pets, cont.
And now, Writers and Kitties, untrammeled delight. Via The New Yorker Book Bench.
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Im in ur wasteland
Imagine if Shakespeare had written Pulp Fiction? Or if LOLcats had written “The Waste Land“?
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The Brothers Carrotmazov Was Taken
I’m not sure if you guys heard, but Elif Batuman joined Twitter a few days ago, and promptly seized the sweetest user alias on the site.
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On the Scroll
“Was Jack Kerouac really a hack?” To quote Truman Capote: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” Though not all writers agree.
Internet Erasure
“There is a wide range of art in the world, but there is an urgent need for art that pushes us and makes us uncomfortable because it forces us to think, to question, to give into it, to resist.” Year in Reading alum Roxane Gay writes on Internet censorship and Dennis Cooper’s now deleted blog.
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