“More commas, please.”
Eudora Welty: 27 Portraits
Before publishing her first story, Eudora Welty worked as a WPA photographer to document the effects of the Great Depression on rural Mississippi. Today, some of her portraits from this time are on display at the Wiljax Gallery in Cleveland, MS. You can take a look at some of them online courtesy of the gallery and The Oxford American.
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In the News
Last Thursday’s Goodreads event hosted by Patrick and featuring Emily Mandel and attended by myself and several other Millions writers and alums got written up in the Wall Street Journal. I’m told that there is a photo of yours truly in the print version, but a hard copy of the WSJ is hard to come by here in the woods. Also, Clancy Martin likes The Millions and some other great sites!
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He Linked To A Site That Wasn’t Literary. What Happened Next Will Shock You.
OK, it’s not exactly “literary,” but nevertheless I promise that “Upworthy Springfield” is worth your time.
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Finnegans Wake Hits Chinese Shelves
I don’t know how they managed to translate the thunderwords into Chinese, but if sales figures indicate success, they did a bang up job. Finnegans Wake is huge in China right now.
Tuesday New Release Day: McEwan; O’Neill; Tsiolkas; Giraldi; Jones; Gluck; Goldberg; Hunt; Mandel
Out this week: The Children Act by Ian McEwan; The Dog by Joseph O’Neill; Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas; Hold the Dark by William Giraldi; Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones; Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück; Gangsterland by Tod Goldberg; Happiness: Ten Years of n + 1; Neverhome by Laird Hunt; and Station Eleven by our own Emily St. John Mandel. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
On Judging
“Gobble a lot of fiction very quickly and you soon find yourself suffering from the literary equivalent of a food intolerance. Oh no, you think, not another novel about X or Y. At these moments, only one thing keeps you going: the faint hope that the book in question might turn out to be the greatest novel ever written about X or Y.” Rachel Cooke writes for The Guardian about reading 80 books in four months and the process of judging the Folio prize.
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Chernobyl’s Literary Legacy
When Belarusian investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize earlier this year, her horrifying and poetic book Voices From Chernobyl exposed a great many readers to the Chernobyl disaster. Now, this piece from The Atlantic takes a look at Chernobyl’s literary legacy over the past three decades.
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