For every download of “In Memory of a Friend, Teacher and Mentor,” Philip Roth’s eulogy to his high school teacher, the folks at Audible will donate a dollar to the Newark Public Library. Learn more in The Paris Review Daily’s new interview with Roth.
Formative Influence
Ishiguro’s Box
The University of Texas at Austin has recently acquired Kazuo Ishiguro’s archive. The collection reveals early drafts, a pulp Western novel that Ishiguro thought had been lost, and his early attempts at songwriting. "For many years," he said, "I've been in the habit of keeping a large cardboard box under my desk into which I throw, more or less indiscriminately, all papers produced during my writing that I don't want to file neatly and take into the next stage of composition: earlier drafts of chapters, rejected pages, scraps of paper with scribbled thoughts, repeated attempts at the same paragraph, etc.”
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On Forgiveness and Thoughts of Transgression
At BOMB Magazine's website, an interview with A.M. Homes, conducted by (who else) a friend who accompanies her to synagogue. Among other things, the two discuss Yom Kippur, adoption, and May We Be Forgiven, the author's latest novel (which we reviewed).
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Bulgaria Week
It's "Bulgaria Week" at Granta, and you can celebrate by reading two of Ivan Landzhev's poems, a short story by Rayko Baychev, a piece by Georgi Tenev, and many more. In case that isn't enough, however, FiveChapters has posted Miroslav Penkov's "Makedonija," and he has a short essay on the FSG Work in Progress site.
52 Years Since Lolita
52 years since Lolita: The Reader’s Almanac recounts the many publishers who turned down Nabokov’s masterpiece in 1953. From one rejection letter: “I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” (via @ElectricLit)
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Hunter S. Thompson’s Job Application
From Hunter S. Thompson's 1958 job application to the Vancouver Sun: “And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you. I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham.”
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A Response to the Death of Writing
"Why, after all, do writers write? What is the impulse, the insistence on story, on seeing and representing the world? It has little to do with technology although everything to do with narrative, which is a purpose that, on the surface, technology also seems to share. The difference is that the writer creates narrative with intention, whereas technology merely gathers, or processes, information, leaving interpretation, analysis, up to us." Let's just say David L. Ulin doesn't think Joyce would work for Google.
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