Joel Lovell profiles George Saunders for The New York Times, and he gives a killer endorsement for Saunders’s latest book, Tenth of December. The author’s collection from thirteen years ago, Pastoralia, was picked on our site as being among the “Best of the Millennium.”
“It is true that if there exists a ‘writer’s writer,’ [George] Saunders is the guy”
The Inmates Have Taken Over
“Summer morning is risen / and to even it wends / and still I’m in prison / without any friends.” Start your Monday off right with this piece from The Paris Review on John Clare, Christopher Smart, and the poetry of the asylum. Speaking of the madhouse, here’s a piece on Anne Sexton and her book Transformations.
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One Yakuza Group Starts its Own Magazine
Yamaguchi-gumi Shinpo, the largest Yakuza faction, has decided to start its own magazine focused on “haiku poetry, articles on the innocent pursuit of angling and entreaties to its readers to perform good works” among other things. Related: recently photographer Christopher Jue journeyed with People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry into the four-story headquarters of the Kudō-kai.
Writing the Godfather of Soul
"Kill ‘Em and Leave is [James] McBride’s own testament to [James] Brown’s philosophy. It’s a stunningly unorthodox book, indifferent to the conventions of biographical nonfiction ... The book is a hybrid of forms, largely a telling of Brown’s life story and partly a telling of McBride’s search for that story, with digressions about the author’s own life, essayistic ruminations on Brown and his music, and free, looping riffs that have the energy of improvisation." On James McBride's unusual, unorthodox biography of the unusual, unorthodox James Brown.
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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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Other Ventures
What's it like being a young journalist in a turbulent time for the business? Some of my fellow Medill grads and I have created a blog to discuss that and other pressing matters. If you're a journalism junkie like I am, you'll enjoy The Newshole. Check it out.Longtime Millions contributor Emre has started a blog called Live from Gybria, where he will chronicle his travels, his life as a Turkish expat, and his studies at my illustrious alma mater, the Medill School of Journalism. Luckily, Emre will still be posting here, too. In fact, we'll be putting up some more of his reading journals here in the next few days.And congrats to Anne Fernald (proprietor of the litblog Fernham) whose book Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader has just been published.
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9.5 Pornographic Fairy Tales
This interview with Joanna Walsh, creator of the #Readwomen Twitter account and fiction editor at 3:AM Magazine, is just plain fun. In it, Walsh touches on nearly everything from sex writing to Sigmund Freud to the Marx Brothers.