“I took maybe ten more speed pills and sat in a stall and wrote a new chapter of Atlas Shrugged,” writes Ayn Rand (er, um, John Hodgman). “Perhaps twenty-five thousand words, all on toilet paper.”
Ask Ayn (Rand)
Edwin Frank Interview
Vince Manapat’s interview with NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank provides an interesting (if slightly erroneous) history of how the publisher got started. If you come away from the interview wondering what Mr. Frank recommends reading, then, ta-da! and look no further.
The perils of befriending your heros.
David Bezmozgis‘s beautiful and painful essay on befriending his literary hero, Leonard Michaels.
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“He says, ‘their hearts should be burned.’”
Jeff Sharlet traveled to Russia because he “wanted to see what ordinary LGBT life was like in a nation whose leaders have decided that ‘homosexualism’ is a threat to its ‘sexual sovereignty.’” What he found was unsettling and terrifying, but the courage of the LGBT community members he interviewed is also incredibly inspiring. Set aside time to read this one. It’s essential.
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Fleshing Out “The Man”
Luke Epplin examines the life and legacy of Stan “The Man” Musial, who died last week. In particular Epplin takes issue with how well-intentioned biographers have, over the years, “effectively turned Musial into a cardboard cutout, a bygone era’s one-dimensional paragon of constancy, stability, community fealty, and humility, devoid of the temperamental shadings that humanize public figures.”
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Epic Fail
When did Samuel Beckett’s “fail better” become the motto of Silicon Valley? At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell traces the history of the phrase. “Fail Better, with its TEDishly counterintuitive feel, is the literary takeaway par excellence; it’s usefully suggestive, too, of the corporate propaganda of productivity, with its appeals to ‘think different’ or ‘work smarter’ or ‘just do it.'”
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Mocha Dick
The (mostly) true story behind Moby-Dick gets the picture-book treatment in Mocha Dick: The Legend and the Fury.