Now that Louise Erdrich has won the National Book Award, it’s worth looking back on her interviews from recent years. You can read her piece in the Art of Fiction series, published in 2010 in The Paris Review; you could try her interview with the Times from back in October; or else you could take a look at her sit-down with The New Yorker in April. (This probably goes without saying, but you could also just read her new novel.)
The Author Would Like to Say Something
Get Ready for Downton Abbey’s Third Season
The third season of Downton Abbey has an official trailer, but to really gear up for the upcoming episodes, you might want to pad your reading list.
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Gulf Stream, Issue 9
The creative writing department at Florida International University has released the ninth issue of their on-campus literary magazine, Gulf Stream. The issue features the publication’s first inaugural Author Roundtable – a discussion between agents and writers from the Miami Writers Institute and novelists Cathy Day and Marc Fitten.
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He Linked To A Site That Wasn’t Literary. What Happened Next Will Shock You.
OK, it's not exactly "literary," but nevertheless I promise that "Upworthy Springfield" is worth your time.
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Hitchens Memoir Moved
The Christopher Hitchens memoir, Mortality, a collection of essays based around the final pieces he wrote for Vanity Fair, now has an official U.S. release date of September, and the U.K. release date has been moved to coincide with that.
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Writing Like a Reader
Over at Catapult, Lynn Steger Strong writes on writing a novel that readers will read. As she puts it, “I was trying to explore the specific experience of living in the world while also living largely, sometimes to one’s own detriment, inside of books, inside one’s head.” Also check out this Millions piece, featuring six writers looking back on their first novels.
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Pale Fire
You can't write about Robert Lowell without writing about mental illness -- the poet went through many stretches of mania and psychosis in his life. In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reads a "medico-biography" of Lowell, which takes a full measure of his lifelong illness and its consequences.
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Longlisting Other Languages
PEN America has announced the longlist for its 2017 Translation Prize, including Deborah Smith for Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (see our review here), Carlos Rojas for Yan Lianke’s The Explosion Chronicles, and Victoria Cribb for Sjón's Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was. (We profiled Sjón's work at length a few years back!) The winner will be announced in February of 2017.
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