“Utter devotion to the principle that distraction is Satan and writing is paramount can be just as poisonous as an excess of diversion,” writes Benjamin Nugent.
In Defense of Distraction
Happy 10th Birthday, Melville House
Melville House turned 10 years old this week, and one way to celebrate the occasion is by reading this lovely profile of the indie publisher’s founders.
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Vocal Harmony
At the LARB, Len Gutkin interviews Year in Reading alumnus William H. Gass, whose new novel, Middle C, incorporates techniques of twelve-tone composition. (In case you missed it, I wrote about the book a few weeks ago.)
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Geoff Dyer on Pagetti’s Syria
The devastating images of Syria shot by Franco Pagetti have been collected into a series entitled Veiled Aleppo. Over at The New Republic, Geoff Dyer writes about one of them. It’s an image, Dyer observes, that features “symbols … of the death throes not of a city but of film.”
The Perils of Contact
The Perils of ‘Contact Me’: in an essay in the New York Times, Ben Yagoda wonders whether authors have made themselves too accessible to readers.
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Good Riddance
Recommended reading: Jason Arthur bids “Good Riddance to the Good-Bye-To-New-York Essay” for The Rumpus. Pair with Eryn Loeb‘s review of Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and our own Elizabeth Minkel‘s account of rereading Didion‘s original “Goodbye to All That.”