Recommended Reading: “Fog Count” by Leslie Jamison, which is a stunning piece of writing about West Virginia, coal country, an ultramarathon runner, the American housing crisis, its nightmarish prison system, and so, so much more.
Fog Count
Pale King Confusion
After our discovery yesterday that The Pale King was already on sale, the New York Times finds lots of angry booksellers, but not much by way of explanation.
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Take a Look at Cormac McCarthy’s Screenplay
The New Yorker has a sneak peek at some scenes Cormac McCarthy wrote for the forthcoming Ridley Scott film, The Counsellor.
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Some Choice DFW Links
GQ offers an insightful interview with The New Yorker‘s Deborah Treisman on the subject of editing David Foster Wallace…while elsewhere, the German translation of Infinite Jest – Un Endlicher Spass – becomes an unlikely hit. (via)
Book Pirates
The American author is dead, long live the American author! At the New York Times, a eulogy.
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Jeff Sharlet Revisits The Fellowship
Several years ago, Jeff Sharlet closely investigated The Fellowship – a “self-described invisible network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful” – in order to write a book about “how fundamentalism came to be interwoven with American power.” Now, Sharlet has followed up his initial report with an article about Westmont College, a “feeder school” for the religious movement. This is highly recommended reading for anybody interested in the intersections of power, influence, religious fundamentalism, and American politics.
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Brian Oliu’s Video Game Essays
This week Uncanny Valley Press released Leave Luck to Heaven, Brian Oliu’s collection of lyric essays based on “the weird, painful things we made NES games carry for us because we didn’t know where else to put them.” To get a taste for Oliu’s style, check out “Mile Zero,” which will be featured in a different manuscript down the line.
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“I was on the edge of crazy.”
Recommended Reading: the first two chapters of Roxane Gay’s novel, An Untamed State, which are available courtesy of Longreads.
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Post-post
Recommended Reading: Millions contributor Shaj Mathew on avant-garde fiction.
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