If the Dublin City Council doesn’t name their newest bridge after Flann O’Brien, writes Frank McNally, then perhaps the author’s memorial should be built in Paris, Zurich, Trieste, or “any of the other great European cities to which he didn’t emigrate.”
O’Brien’s Bridge
Writers on Reading
How do writers read? Elisa Gabbert asked ten writers, including Teju Cole and Laura Van Den Berg (who wrote about her pet wolf Natasha for The Millions), about their reading habits for The Believer.
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Recommended Reading: Outkast Edition
Recommended Reading: Bomani Jones’s essay on Outkast’s ATLiens, his first car, and the way things from your past just seem different as the years go by.
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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Lend Me Talent
Last Friday marked the feast day of Francis de Sales, better known as the patron saint of writers and journalists. The saint, who lived in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, got his title thanks to his propensity for using flyers and pamphlets to convert people to Catholicism. At The Paris Review Daily, Dan Piepenbring reads the saint’s most famous work, Introduction to the Devout Life.
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Rough Starts
“I struggled, quite a bit, writing this review. Reviewing books, while easy in certain ways — you have certain aspects of form to follow, there are certain features of books that cannot go unremarked: one must write about character, about language, about technique — and really a rather simple process (much simpler, it would seem, than writing books), can also be a pain. Especially, frustratingly enough, when the book is really good.” On Lola Lafon’s We Are the Birds of the Coming Storm.