Jeff Sharlet had a challenge for his creative nonfiction students at Dartmouth College. Sensing that journalism had become too “dull,” too mired in a “culture of professionalism” divided “between reporting and ‘storytelling,’” Sharlet asked his students who didn’t “know [any] better” to create a magazine of their own. The result, 40 Towns, embraces “the right conditions” of literary creation – immersion, journalism, regionalism and “a term of revision” – to present a “collection of documents, artifacts of real life” about the Upper Valley.
40 Towns, An Experiment in Literary Journalism
Brillante
Is Alejandro Zambra the new great Latin American writer? James Wood thinks he is. In the latest New Yorker, he describes how Zambra’s new story collection alerted him to the writer’s oeuvre, going on to analyze all three of the writer’s novels in English. You could also read our 2011 interview with Zambra.
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Carl Köhler in Toronto
The University of Toronto now has a webpage up for its current exhibition “Beyond the Words: Author Portraits by Carl Köhler.” See some of Köhler’s remarkable portraits of artists and intellectuals and read about him here.
Stories Are Clumsy Beasts
Over at ZYZZYVA, Christian Kiefer talks to playwright Octavio Solis and novelist Scott Hutchins about the craft of writing and the difference between writing plays and writing novels. “It takes a huge amount of hard labor, man, to harness the forces that we are using to make our stories. They may emerge whole cloth out of our need to know how we operate as humans, but they’re often clumsy unfinished beasts.” Kiefer’s new novel, The Animals, is one of the most anticipated books of 2015.
The Relevance of Plasma
The vigilant excavators at Longform have dug up a fairly old piece, written by the essayist Jo Ann Beard, on a time in her life taken up by cagey dogs, vanishing husbands and the plasma in Saturn’s rings.
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Sounding Off
Shakespeare conspiracy theorists might still wonder who the real playwright was, but we do know what he would’ve sounded like. Linguist David Crystal and his son, actor Ben Crystal, demonstrate the original pronunciation of the Bard’s best. Bonus: An interview with Ben on the research behind the pronunciation.
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A Daredevil By Any Other Name
Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life might well be the only book in history to draw comparisons between creative writers and stunt pilots. At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova calls attention to a description of Dave Rahm, the real-life pilot who inspired Dillard’s analogy.
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A Stake in the Conflict
Reporting on a war in your homeland is tricky business, but in the fifties, Albert Camus (whose collected articles on the Algerian War of Independence are now available in book form) managed, in spite of his investment in the conflict, to get it right.
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