Masha Gessen will be the first writer to publish a book about the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Previously the author demonstrated her knowledge of Chechnya in her 2012 book The Man Without a Face. Gessen, who is also working on a book about embattled punk group Pussy Riot, will reportedly leave her directorship at Moscow Radio Liberty in order to report on both projects full time.
Masha Gessen Signs on to Write Tsarnaev Book
Alone In the Most Beautiful Place
Recommended Reading: This essay from The Literary Hub on how Jean Rhys and her novel Wide Sargasso Sea extended the limits of a feminism which was rooted in the work of Charlotte Brontë.
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Meet the Lancasters
Hazel Grace has a family now. True Blood’s Sam Trammell will play Hazel’s dad in the film adaptation of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. Last month, our own Nick Moran reported that Laura Dern joined the cast as Hazel’s mom. With the Lancaster family complete, filming will start in Pittsburgh at the end of this month. If you still haven’t read the book yet, let our own Janet Potter convince you.
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Remembering Denis Johnson
“He believed it a privilege and a shame that his race and nationality gave him the chance to come and go from lands where a guillotine blade seemed to dangle forever over the local citizens.” Denis Johnson‘s longtime Esquire editor Will Blythe pens a remembrance of the writer for The New York Times. See also: our own Sonya Chung‘s recommendation of Johnson’s celebrated short story collection Jesus’ Son to a friend some years back. “I know it will knock him out,” she wrote. “It does (of course).”
Marlon James’s Minnesota
“In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them. By now, the person I created in New York was the only one I wanted to be. …Eight years after reaching the end of myself, I was on borrowed time. Whether it was in a plane or a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica.” Marlon James, author of The Book of Night Women, which once gave me so much trouble, and whose novel A Brief History of Seven Killings the Book Report covered here, writes for the New York Times Magazine about leaving Jamaica to find himself in Minnesota.
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Rabbit, Realtor
For the low, low price of a quarter of a million dollars, John Updike’s boyhood home could be yours! (via)