The vigilant excavators at Longform have dug up a fairly old piece, written by the essayist Jo Ann Beard, on a time in her life taken up by cagey dogs, vanishing husbands and the plasma in Saturn’s rings.
The Relevance of Plasma
Author Internet 101
“I think the key to social media for authors is remembering this: its main purpose is really to show that you are a real human being who lives in this world.” Year in Reading alums (respectively) Celeste Ng, Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, and Adam M. Grant talk to LitHub about how to be a writer on the internet.
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Listening to Joyce
We’ve written before about various rare recordings of authors reading that occasionally surface on the internet (a sample here) but today we add a new author: James Joyce. Open Culture has posted two recordings of the author reading from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and while the audio quality is exactly what you would expect for recordings made in the 1920s, we still recommend listening.
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Two Feet Bad
“Children have a keen sense of injustice, and this was the thing that upset me the most: the pigs were so unjust.” Margaret Atwood recalls an early love of George Orwell.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Toibin, Oswalt, Rachman
Colm Tóibín’s new collection The Empty Family is out today, as is comedian Patton Oswalt’s Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. New in paperback: 2010 fave The Imperfectionists. Many more new books to look forward to, of course, in our massive preview published this week.
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Must-Read Books for Kids
School hasn’t started back up yet, so if you’re looking for ways to entertain your kids until the end of Summer, I recommend perusing NPR’s round-up of “100 Must-Reads For Kids 9-14.” (Or, you know, tell them to just go outside already. And to be sure to shut the door to keep the air conditioning in.)
The Artist’s Guide to Parenting
“The physical purpose of reproduction is, obviously, the continuation and renewal of genetic continuity, human survival. Its psychological purpose seems to me to be a particularly poignant kind of mutual learning and, matters being equal, ineffable comfort.” What is the relationship between being an artist and being a parent? Maria Popova at Brain Pickings takes a look at sculptor Anne Truitt’s collected journals, Daybook, to try and suss out an answer.
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Exotic and Rarely Worn
“My mind flashed that disembodied jaw at me in a jaw’s version of full color; a dirty white that bone and snow agree on.” This piece of original short fiction from Kashana Cauley at The Daily Beast will make you never want to set foot in a Hermés store–or even just shop on Black Friday.
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