Neil Gaiman’s writing gets compared to “a great bowl of nachos” in Nikki Steele’s food-focused review of The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Pair with: our own Nick Moran on how his favorite books influence his appetite.
Neil Gaiman Nachos
Who You Calling “Late,” Buddy?
Behold the launch of Bloom, a fabulous new website (founded by our own Sonya Chung) that pays attention to older writers who meet her definition of “Late Bloomers.” (In case you’re wondering, the site spun off from our own Post-40 Bloomers series).
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Notable Occupants
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations attracted two notable literary figures this weekend. Author and activist Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) addressed protestors. Here’s the longer, uncut version of her speech. On Sunday, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (Living in the End Times) gave an address as well.
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A Spider of a Writer
Year in Reading alumna Parul Sehgal’s column for The New York Times debuted last week with her reflections on the great Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. As she puts it, “He is a spider of a writer: subtle and sly, patient, with invisible designs. He never proclaims — he never needs to. He envelops.” Pair with John Yargo’s Millions essay on Hrabal’s fiction.
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Ten-Part Twitter Interviews with Sheila Heti
In a new ten-part Believer series, Sheila Heti is interviewing ten of her “favorite people on Twitter” so they can “talk about what they do on Twitter and why – their Twitter philosophies, their do’s and don’ts, and what they make of the medium in general.” Kicking off the series, we have Heti’s interview with Kimmy Walters, who you may know better as @arealliveghost. (You can bookmark this link if you want to keep track of all of the updates.)
Regarding the Pain of Others
Can confessional writing be literary? Kelly Sundberg writes, “When I sit down to write literary writing about my trauma, I am a writer first, and a trauma survivor second, but I am not ever not a trauma survivor, and as such, I am often interested in examining the roots and effects of my own trauma.”