In 2009, Rivka Galchen wrote a lengthy piece in Harper’s about the quest to predict and control hurricanes. Now that her article is sadly apropos, it’s available for free on the web. (Said quest had a major role in the author’s excellent first novel.)
Journalistic Disturbances
Opiates
“The cause of death/was living/the immediate cause/of death was/living in Moscow.” At n +1’s website, Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich excerpt their translations of the Soviet poet Vsevolod Nekrasov.
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Feeding Minds and Mouths
“For kids to be well-read, they need to be well-fed.” The New York Times reports on the trend of U.S. libraries providing summer meals to children.
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Jewish America
Saul Bellow on being Jewish in America, and Lorin Stein, in an interview, discusses contemporary Jewish writers.
Slow Down, September!
There was a lot going on this September. Luckily, the good folks over at The Literary Hub have provided us with this helpful list of five of the best new books September had to offer. A personal favorite includes Emily Donoghue’s The Wonder, in which the protagonist appears to be subsisting on nothing but water.
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Holden Caulfield Has No Friends
Chances are you’ve heard that in a recent interview, Claire Messud responded to a patronizing question about one of her characters — “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?” — by giving her interviewer a smackdown that resonated across the blogosphere. At Page-Turner, several authors (including Rivka Galchen, Jonathan Franzen and Year in Reading alumna Margaret Atwood) offer their own takes on the matter of “likeability.” (There’s also this piece by our own Emily St. John Mandel to consider.)
The Writing Life Fantasy
Admit it, at one point or another you had a certain idea of what a writer’s life looks like. What comes to mind when someone says “I’m a writer?” You may picture a struggling hipster artist who lives in a smal apartment with books everywhere and does nothing but read and write. Rosalie Knecht explores the fascinating idea that we associate certain specific images with the writer lifestyle based off an Anthropologie catalogue. Not convinced? Read it for yourself.
“It will not be simple, it will not take long”
Poet and essayist Adrienne Rich passed way this afternoon at the age of 82, the LA Times confirms. Her influence on writing and activism is immeasurable, and this is a sad day of all of literature. The Poetry Foundation’s short biography of the poet is not to be missed, and nor are her poems “Final Notions,” and “For the Dead.”