Lindsay King-Miller — she of Ask A Queer Chick — pays tribute to an old friend who died before her twenty-sixth birthday.
Hold On
Rachel Kushner and the Costa Concordia
Recommended reading: Rachel Kushner writes about the Costa Concordia disaster, cruise ships in general, and her own short-lived “aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training” for The London Review of Books.
It Spaketh
You might think the signs would be obvious. The buildings are organic, the sky is filled with dragons, and everyone you talk to speaks languages you’ve never heard of. But you may still need some help figuring out your environs. Herewith, a few ways to tell if you’re in a high-fantasy novel.
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Yea, As If They Know What They’re Doing
Here are some writing tips from Henry Miller, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman.
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There’s Franco in My McCarthy
Sometime Ph.D candidate, sometime actor, and ubiquitous lit blog all-star James Franco (henceforth known as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”) has begun filming an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God in West Virginia, and I’m reminded of that line from W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” — “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Shriver, Leyner, Keret, Sebald, Larkin
New this week are The New Republic by Lionel Shriver, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner, Suddenly, a Knock at the Door by Etgar Keret, W.G. Sebald’s Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001, and The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin.
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Free That Verse
From the Beat poet to the particularly heroic couplet, here’s a handy illustration of poetic justice from Grant Snider over at The New York Times.
It’s the reader.
In his review of Ben Marcus‘s The Flame Alphabet for the LARB, Lee Konstantinou suggests that we have now moved well beyond the death of the author: “In an era where everyone has a novel waiting to come out, authors are legion; it’s the reader who seems, well, dead.” When we interviewed Marcus earlier this year he did not seem particularly mournful. We also reviewed the novel.
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