Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin discusses the lessons he’s learned over the past year. He also gives a shout out to Underground, a film by Serbian director Emir Kusturica. Elsewhere, Zeitlin shares some of the music, books, and movies he’s been enjoying of late.
“Filmmaking is an adventure. Treat it as such.”
Detective Edgar Allan Poe
Before Maxwell’s ever opened, Edgar Allan Poe tried to solve a murder mystery in my native Hoboken.
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The real Susan Orlean diet
The Skinny is acclaimed author Susan Orlean’s strangest work, hands down: a half-serious diet book that advises women, among other things, to cover tempting food with bleach. Not one to follow her own advice, Orlean’s diary of a week of eating for Grub Street features yogurt breakfasts, crackers eaten over sinks, and other basically realistic, bleach-free culinary adventures.
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Home Is Where the Story Begins
“Is the reason to have a home, as the narrator in Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, asserts, ‘to keep certain people in and everyone else out’? Or does home, as the narrator in William Maxwell’s autobiographical novel So Long, See You Tomorrow suggests, work primarily as a scaffolding of known things — as a place to read, a place to stash the damp umbrella, a place to listen to the porch swing creak?” Beth Kephart on the literary significance of home.
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Reading for the Worse
Leslie Jamison and Francine Prose discuss the ways reading can affect your life for the worse, with potential results ranging from murder to being bad at sports.
Just Listen
For this month’s fiction podcast at the New Yorker, Edwidge Danticat reads two Jamaica Kincaid stories, “Girl” and “Wingless,” following the publication of Kincaid’s recent See Now Then.
You’re Too Kind
At Flavorwire, Jason Diamond names his favorite websites for literature lovers, choosing to give the number one spot to… uh… there isn’t really a humble way to say this, so… The Millions. He gives it to The Millions. (Aw shucks.)
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“Because I speak in tongues”
Friday would have been Ray Bradbury’s 94th birthday, which is why Dan Piepenbring, at The Paris Review Daily, looked back on one of Bradbury’s classic stories and picked out some choice quotes from his Art of Fiction interview. Piepenbring also pointed out that the story gets a mention in, among other places, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. You could supplement this by reading Tanjil Rashid on the author’s Middle East connection.