Need to kill 37 minutes? Check out “The Novelistic Essay and the Essayistic Novel,” a lecture by Geoff Dyer from this past year’s Key West Literary Summit. (h/t Mark O’Connell)
Geoff Dyer on Novelistic Essays and Essayistic Novels
Poetry From Hanoi Hilton
Bill Keller discusses John Borling’s Taps On The Walls, a collection of poems “tapped out in code, letter by letter, on the walls of a wretched cell in Hanoi during his 6 1/2 years as a prisoner of war.”
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Say That Again?
Duncan Murrell has a new essay up on the Harper’s Magazine blog about how difficult it is for journalists to speak to their sources through interpreters. “I became concerned that my interpreters were not delivering my words in the way I delivered them and in precisely the way I meant them,” he writes.
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Nit-Pick
Why does the new Liam Neeson film use a hyphen in its title? According to AP Style, “nonstop” is one word, yet the film is marketed stateside with a hyphen stuck in the middle. At Slate, L.V. Anderson looks into a typographic mystery.
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Ruin-Reading
Junot Díaz is at home discussing his native Hispaniola as he muses on the function of apocalypse – New Orleans, Haiti, and Japan – in our global media landscape.
Seeking Order in Chaos
“Writing an autobiography was therapeutic and traumatic at times, but unlike the novel it continues its therapies and trauma long after I’ve written it.” Laura van den Berg interviews Porochista Khakpour about the differences between novels and memoirs, structure, and Khakpour’s upcoming memoir, Sick. (Sick is one of our most anticipated June releases).
Keys Under the Basket
“Mr. Fogg assured us he would touch down at our place at precisely 8:45 in the evening. Imagine our delight when he not only arrived with all the punctuality befitting an Englishman, but also quite literally touched down! In a hot air balloon!” Introducing literary couchsurfing.
O. Brisky’s Book Sale
A friend of the late O.J. Brisky – longtime proprietor of Micanopy, Florida’s O. Brisky Books – is in the process of selling 100,000 of the man’s books, many of them rare.
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ROOSTER!
Did you forget that The Morning News Tournament of Books starts today? If so, I bet you’re glad you saw this reminder. Have fun.
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