“Or again, does a ‘newsagent’ really need to become a ‘news dealer,’ a ‘flyover’ an ‘overpass,’ a ‘parcel’ a ‘package,’ or in certain circumstances ‘between’ ‘among’ and ‘like’ ‘such as’?” How to sound American.
Mother Tongue
Does This Mean Lewis Lapham is Morpheus?
Picador’s Gabrielle Gantz is holding monthly conversations with bloggers, and she posts the results on the publishing house’s fantastic Tumblr. Here she interviews Aidan Flax-Clark, associate editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, and gets him to discuss the similarities between his research and The Matrix.
On the Cover
Janet Hansen, designer for Alfred A. Knopf, explains her process in creating the cover for Steven Millhauser’s Voices in the Night. Look back on our comparisons of U.S. and U.K. book covers.
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Sense of an Ending
How do you know when you’re finished writing a novel? Electric Literature’s advice column, The Blunt Instrument, tackles the timeless questions of how to begin and when to end. If it’s endings you’re after, this piece from The Millions on writers and last lines will help give you some closure.
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Dear and Dirty
Haven’t read our own Mark O’Connell’s great new essay at Slate? To mark the hundredth anniversary of Dubliners, Mark paid a visit to the James Joyce House, which led him to reflect on life in his native city. “If you live in Dublin, if you are yourself a Dubliner,” he writes, “no matter how many times you read the book, it will always reveal something profound and essential and unrealized about the city and its people.”
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Hidebound
A couple months ago, I linked to a new Granta series in which authors select one of their own first sentences and recall how they came to it. This week, Patrick French explains the first sentence of a nonfiction piece titled “After the War” (available in Granta 125) by digging up an old photograph that shows how the Edwardian English were “stitched and machined into a grid of expectations.”
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What Katy Meant
Recommended Reading: Lindsay Palka’s essay on the children’s book What Katy Did.
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