For Whom The Bell Tolls
American Gaze
“What does it look like to be the child of war? A product of war? What does it look like to be a queer child from a very traditional Confucian family? How does one feel to pay homage to a family but to also, in a way, betray those familial values?” Kaveh Akbar interviews Ocean Vuong about linguistic identity, syntax, and the American gaze for Divedapper.
2016 Guggenheim Fellows Announced
Earlier today, the Guggenheim Foundation announced this year's Fellows, and the names on their list include a few that Millions readers will recognize. On the fiction side, there's contributor Laila Lalami along with Year in Reading alumni Jess Row and Jesse Ball, while in nonfiction and poetry, there's Amanda Petrusich along with Adam Kirsch, Chris Kraus and Deborah Landau. The winners each receive a sizeable cash grant.
Marketing Creativity
Tim Parks writes at NYRB about the constraints that the marketplace puts on writers' creativity. For more on publishing and the marketplace, check out our column on The Future of the Book.
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“He’s too good-looking”
Surely you’ve heard the hype by now. Surely you’ve seen someone blushing and shifting their eyes askance while reading this book in public. Well, now you can get a taste of what the fuss is all about. You can read the beginning of Alissa Nutting’s Tampa courtesy of Dzanc Books and The Collagist.
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“I wanted to write about the feeling of life. Not life as an intellectual process, or a concept, but as a feeling.”
Tom Murphy, arguably Ireland's greatest living playwright, joins The Paris Review for an interview about his life, his influences, and his rage.
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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.
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Me and Myself
What is the personal essay, and where could it go from here? In The Boston Review, Merve Emre traces two paths.