Stop, thief! It appears that George Eliot’s writing desk has been stolen from the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery in England.
The Desk on the Floss
Seventeen Years Later
“It is a darker book, I don’t deny that, but that’s the story that came to me and wanted to be told.” Seventeen years after Philip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials trilogy ended, the writer is releasing La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of his new trilogy, The Book of Dust. Pullman also said the second volume of the trilogy of already complete, according to The Guardian. Check out our own Janet Potter on grief, books, and His Dark Materials.
Books on the Radio
In case you missed it the first time, Tulsa’s KWGS the week re-aired an interview with my co-editor Jeff Martin on our book that came out earlier this year, The Late American Novel.
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Hurricane Harvey Relief
The Texas Library Association has a disaster relief fund to support damaged libraries, and you can give to it here (via Book Riot).
Are Young Writers in Their Prime?
Sam Tanenhaus, musing about the New Yorker “young writers” list points out that, far from being a writer’s formative years, many of the great classics in literary history were penned by writers in their 30s, or younger.
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Which is Which
“Two writers guard an archive. One writes Fiction; the other writes Fact. To get past them, you have to figure out which is which.” Recommended reading: The New Yoker‘s Jill Lepore attempts to trace the “long-lost story of the longest book ever written,” Joe Gould‘s The Oral History of Our Time.
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Writer Etiquette
What’s the one question you should never ask a writer starting a new book: how’s the writing going? “Nothing can damage a novel in embryo as quickly and effectively as trying to describe it before it’s ready,” Mark Slouka writes. Follow his advice for how to keep your writer friends.