Good news for Catch-22 fans: a previously unpublished Joseph Heller story appears in the newest issue of Strand Magazine. (h/t Paris Review)
Just Like Christmas
Take Three
You may have read our review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel The Buried Giant. You may also have read our own Mark O’Connell’s review at Slate. For another opinion, you could read James Wood, who writes about Ishiguro’s “prose of provoking equilibrium” in the latest New Yorker.
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The Elements of Style
Alexander Chee invites Ann Beattie, Matt Bell, and five other writers to reflect on the usage of the present tense, “the current preferred mode of the self-taught writer.” Pair with our own Michael Bourne’s essay on grammar and Anthony Doerr.
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Agoraphobia
As part of his research for his recent treatise on office life, Cubed, n + 1 editor Nikil Saval looked back on his own years in an open office. In an interview with Sara Scribner, he talks about his growing awareness that it wasn’t good for his health: “It was sociable in some good senses, but also mostly not a pleasant place to be.”
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Recommended Reading is Here!
Starting strong out of the gate with a new short story from Ben Marcus, Electric Lit‘s latest project, Recommended Reading is here! There’s also a single sentence animation and a letter from the editor. And best of all, it’s published directly to Tumblr, though you can also read the story on your Kindle or ePub reader.
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T. S. Eliot: Proud Banker
Many aspiring writers wind up in publishing jobs or teaching posts. Some view the career choice as a happy union between their creative interests and their vocational qualifications. T. S. Eliot was not so. In an article for The Rumpus, Lisa Levy notes that the poet continued “to work at the bank even after his poems [became] successful,” and that the poet found the work “more conducive to writing poetry and criticism than taking a more literary job might be.”
First He Marched, Now He’ll Run
“But the civil rights movement didn’t stop in Selma.” In a follow-up to March, his award-winning graphic novel trilogy, Congressman John Lewis will have a new series published later this year by Abrams ComicArt, according to Time. Run, which will also be a multi-book series, will pick up where March left off. Pair with: The Millions‘s review of March.