“Most of us can’t write like our heroes, but nearly every one of us can try to drink like them.” Ian Crouch examines the myth of the great alcoholic writer and Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend in The New Yorker‘s “The Book That Will Make You Never Want to Drink Again.”
Drinking Fitzgerald Under the Table
Jacqueline Woodson on the Joys of Reading Slowly
In a TED talk dedicated to taking the time to appreciate stories, Jacqueline Woodson extols the virtues of reading slowly.
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With One Eye Squinted
“I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.” The New Yorker reports on “Flannery O’Connor‘s Manhattan Memorial” and pitch-perfect quotation.
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Literature’s Favorite Houseguests
Jessica Francis Kane lists some of her favorite houseguests in literature, including King Lear, Jane Bennet, and more.
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The Art of Villanelle Isn’t Hard to Master
The villanelle, beloved by Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Dylan Thomas, might be making a comeback.
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Sex Appeal
You may remember the brouhaha surrounding Bustle, the first website in history to market primarily to women. Now, in this week’s New Yorker, Lizzie Widdicombe profiles the website, which she describes by pointing out that “[its] articles are modest, but the ambitions of its founder, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Bryan Goldberg, are not.”
Medieval Advice
Need to know how to tell if someone is or is not dead? How to leave a party gracefully? How to avoid the plague? Luckily the writers of the Middle Ages had a how-to book for everything, even if that advice does include killing bed bugs by “Spread[ing] Gun-powder, beaten small, about the crevices of your bedstead” and then lighting it.
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Replacement Burrito
Recommended Reading: This moving essay on secrecy, shame, and binging by Michael Sinert over at The Rumpus: “Our task is to de-son-of-a-bitch all this.”
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Joyless
Poor Emily Schultz. Her debut novel is getting trashed on Amazon — not because it’s a bad novel, but because a number of reviewers have confused her with Stephen King. (It doesn’t help that her magazine also shares a name with King’s novel.)
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