“In another experiment, people who went through this ‘experience-taking’ process while reading about a character who was revealed to be of a different race or sexual orientation showed more favorable attitudes toward the other group and were less likely to stereotype.”
You Are What You Read
Seducing, Conquering, Discovering
An heroic L Magazine contributor read all 1,597 pages of Jan Kjaerstad's Wergerland Trilogy (brought to you by our friends at Overlook and Open Letter) to bring you this review.
Incendiary Verse
Do you love poetry, but often wish you were monitored on more government watchlists? Well, now you can scratch both of those itches by purchasing Poetry of the Taliban, a new anthology endorsed by and published on the group’s website. Unsurprisingly, the book has garnered its share of criticism, but as Melville House’s Kelly Burdick notes, it also has a coalition of allies and proponents.
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Strange Brew
Lorrie Moore once said in an interview that what’s good for writing is bad for life. In this vein, we might assume that coffee, which is bad for your health but good for your writing, neatly supports her conjecture. But what if it turns out that coffee is a detriment to creativity? Maria Konnikova investigates research that suggests this might be the case.
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Meet Miss Simone
Meet Eunice Waymon, who Nina Simone was before she became Nina Simone. John Lahr reviews What Happened, Miss Simone? by Alan Light. Pair with Bill Morris’s piece on the Hollywood biopic.
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And Hobbes Appears Where, Exactly?
At HTML Giant, Mike Kleine writes a 25-point review of The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. If you need a refresher, you might want to check out our rundown of tiger-based literature.
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Thoughts of a Migraineur
“Stories are born unconsciously, but I think the writer determines whether the turn a book has taken is true or false through feeling, which is conscious. I shape my stories in this or that way because the story answers something that is emotionally rather than literally true for me.” At Full-Stop, Siri Hustvedt talks fiction with Tyler Malone.
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