“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
A(n Induced) Standing Ovation
Science now confirms what’s long been suspected by people related to theater kids: “the quality of a performance does not drive the amount of applause an audience gives.”
The United States of Poetry
Poetry readership among U.S. adults is the highest it's been in 15 years—with young adult readership (among 18-24 year olds) nearly doubling—according to the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). (For what it's worth: The Millions has always loved poetry).
Twilight Belt
What does it mean that the "Twilight Belt" so closely resembles the Bible Belt?
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French Fiction
Recommended recommendations: Nancy Kline surveys recently translated French novels for the New York Times Book Review. Pair with our own Bill Morris's piece in the Daily Beast on the 2014 Nobel Prize Winner Patrick Modiano and "Why American's Don't Read Foreign Fiction."
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Looking at Something?
At Bookforum, Rebecca Donner talks with former Granta editor John Freeman about his new book of interviews, How to Read a Novelist. Freeman says that he enjoys interviewing writers in their homes because it allows him to observe them more closely: “The writer thinks you're taking notes about what he's saying, but you're really writing, ‘His head looks like a lion's head.’”
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