“Was Jack Kerouac really a hack?” To quote Truman Capote: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” Though not all writers agree.
On the Scroll
Dispatch from Brazil
Recommended Reading: Selections from the forthcoming Women Writing Brazil issue of PEN America’s Glossolalia.
The Task of the Translators
Pevear and Volokhonsky (first names no longer needed, really…like Madonna or Cher) rap with The Wall Street Journal about their luminous (dare we say definitive?) new translation of Tolstoy‘s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories.
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Celebrating America’s Birthday
It was America’s birthday this week. Celebrate with quintessential American fiction, according to the rest of the world (via LitHub). More of a poetry person? We search for the great American epic.
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Time Magazine Goes Soft
Last week, a lot of people were disappointed by Time‘s decision to “water down” the latest issue’s cover for its American audience. As a follow-up, ShortFormBlog takes a look at the publication’s history of doing this, and also their reasoning.
Lee’s Co-Conspirator
Recently there’s been a lot of talk about the famously reclusive Harper Lee, and with good reason – her long-awaited second book, Go Set A Watchman, was released last week, and isn’t quite what readers expected. Over at The Atlantic, Ari N. Schulman takes a slightly different approach to Lee and her work by focusing instead on Maurice Cain, Lee’s longtime agent, friend, and “co-conspirator.”
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We at the Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn
The Oxford American has made True Grit author Charles Portis’s “Motel Life, Lower Reaches” available online for the first time. The piece first appeared in an OA issue from 2003, and it’s also available in Escape Velocity, but you should still read it because it’s Charles Portis, damn it, and you’ve only one life to live in this world. (Related: Hobart just published their “Hotel Culture” issue, which is also worth your time.)