“Me? He wants me to give him advice? But why? I still have no idea what I am doing. Then I realized that I did, at least, have eight more years of a writing practice that had run in tandem with a life of odd jobs, graduate school, starting a business, traveling, etc. I thought about an anecdote my friend Daniel once told me about what happened when Ian McEwan was asked to give advice to a young writer just starting out. He simply said, ‘Be successful.’” Catherine Lacey gives advice to a not-much-younger writer.
Advice From The Hoary
Censoring an Iranian Story
Recommended Reading: Iranian novelist-in-exile Shahriar Mandanipour talks about censorship, religion, and love in Little Village.
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Amor Amphibii
We submit that beginning a love story with the lede “I never intended to get a tortoise” pretty much guarantees that the reader will read to the end. In Sunday's New York Times Style section, Caroline Leavitt puts our theory to the test. (If you like her essay, you might want to pre-order her new novel.)
8-bits on 8-bits on 8-bits
From the folks who brought you 8-bit illustrations of 8 Short Stories’ Opening Lines, get a load of 10 Classic Novel Covers in 8-bit form. Together, this might be enough to actually make you want to listen to Anamanaguchi.
On Road Trips and Book Hoarding
"Driving hundreds of miles at a time... uncorked the forgotten joys of my undergraduate years—chief among them the fantasy that simply buying a book guarantees that it will get read." Ted Trautman on going on a book-buying binge during a cross-country road-trip.
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“You Need a Rhyming Word? That’s What We Heard!”
Sesame Street turned in a literary puppet parody in their Sons of Anarchy send-up: Sons of Poetry.
Whaleship Essex to Become BBC Documentary
The true story of the Whaleship Essex – which was deftly recounted in Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2000 book In the Heart of the Sea – will soon be adapted into a 90-minute documentary for the BBC. As avid whale watchers already know, the plight of the Essex is what ultimately inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick. You can get an overview of the disaster at Melville House’s blog, Moby Lives. (How appropriate!)
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Tuesday, New Release Day
Don DeLillo's slim new volume Point Omega is out. The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece on DeLillo that explains how the movie Psycho helped inspire the book. Also new this week is Louise Erdrich's new novel Shadow Tag
Finnegans Punk
Forget One Direction. Meet the little known boy band made up of John Cage, James Joyce, and Joey Ramone. Cage composed a song based on Joyce's Finnegans Wake called "The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs," which Ramone later sang to haunting effect.