“I think essay and memoir hang together in a balance. There’s any number of ways to strike it, but from Montaigne on down that balance seems key to their design.” The Paris Review interviews the essayist Michelle Orange, author of the recent This Is Running For Your Life.
Writing For Your Life
The Lorax Mourns Another Tree
Readers across the country are mourning a fallen Monterey cypress tree, said to have inspired the classic Dr. Seuss book The Lorax.
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Updated Advice Classics
Two advice classics, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Emily Post’s Etiquette, have been updated for the era of Facebook and Google Plus.
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Hits and Misses
“You’d be hard-pressed to find a book that was at once so bold in style and ambitious in structure and so much fun to read.” The Guardian asks indie publishers about the books that made their year, including Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue (whose own Year in Reading you can find here).
The Thrill of Writing Prose
Bookforum interviewed Garth Greenwell about the queer tradition of autofiction, the impulse to write fiction, and the thrill of surprising oneself. Also check out this Millions review of Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs to You.
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“I’ll die soon, said / the boy to the bird.”
Recommended Reading: Two poems by Slovene poet Tomaž Šalamun.