“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
Haruki Murakami: Master of Blandness
Over at Threepenny Review, Jess Row expounds on “blandness” in the work of Haruki Murakami, and particularly in his 2.8 lb. tome 1Q84—a book tabbed by Charles Baxter in last year’s Year in Reading as the best he’d read all year. Row contemplates the way Murakami’s characters and sentences “almost never lose this placid, observant neutrality,” or “continuous monotone.”
The 12th Caine Prize
NoViolet Bulawayo has won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story “Hitting Budapest” (pdf).
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A Shortlister in Our Midst
Big congratulations to Millions staffer Emily St. John Mandel, whose novel The Singer’s Gun was shortlisted for the Indie Booksellers Choice Award!
Timing Is Everything
“In a world where reality has become stranger than fiction, actual books are no longer selling.” At The New Republic, Morgan Jerkins talks with agents, authors, booksellers, editors, and publicists about whether the Trump presidency is bad for the book business. And on that note, let’s revisit our own Bill Morris on book releases: “There are few iron facts in the crapshoot of the literary life, but here’s one: In book publishing — no less than in music, war, and sex — timing is everything.”
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Don’t Tell
“The gross-out factor of the last section stuck with me, but not in a way I enjoyed.” Writing workshop critiques as applied to your sex life.
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A Voice for the Voiceless
“Their reporting led to Mr. Weinstein’s firing and set off a national conversation about the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment.” New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey will publish a book with Penguin Press about the recent sexual abuse and harassment allegations that have rocked the country. From our archives: Hannah Gersen‘s essay about seeing and hearing women in film.