It’s an age-old question for writers and thinkers: how do you quiet the noise of your thoughts? In Aeon Magazine, Tim Parks wonders if it’s even possible to silence internal monologues — and, if it is, whether that silence means losing sight of our identities. (Related: our own Mark O’Connell reviewed Parks’s latest book.)
Stopping the Voices
A Book about Beauty
In his latest Year in Reading, Chigozie Obioma told us about Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty Is a Wound, “the howling masterpiece of 2015…a howl, an outrage, and a sheer burst of particular talent.” In an illuminating interview for Electric Literature, Kurniawan discusses the label “magic realism,” epic creation, and his ideas for his next novel.
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Julia Whicker’s Song of the Exile
What to do when novel writing gets painful? Start a fashion blog.
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Baking with Nietzsche
No need to bake sugar cookies this holiday season. Try Nietzsche’s angel food cake recipe instead. “Allow the angel to reach room temperature. Then kill it,” Rebecca Coffey writes the recipe for McSweeney’s. You can find more literary cooking tips in Coffey’s Nietzsche’s Angel Food Cake: And Other Recipes for the Intellectually Famished.
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The Voyage of the Poet
“I think what I would really most like to write about is palm trees and bougainvillea and hummingbirds. I would like to go into the desert and write about salamanders and the Grand Canyon, but history keeps rupturing my experience because politics are everywhere.” National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis on overcoming brain damage and becoming a poet. Pair with Andrew Kay’s Millions essay on the power of poetry.