NPR caught up with Wild author Cheryl Strayed to talk about a stranger who had a particularly personal connection with the writer’s book. As it turns out, she was Strayed’s half-sister. (Bonus: we interviewed Strayed for our site last year.)
Cheryl Strayed Discovers Her Long Lost Sister
New DFW
An excerpt from David Foster Wallace‘s unfinished novel, The Pale King, appears this week in The New Yorker. It’s good.
Dark and Tough
Last year, Laura van den Berg came out with a new book, The Isle of Youth, which Nathan Huffstutter reviewed for The Millions. On the Guernica blog, Dwyer Murphy interviews van den Berg, who talks about jacket photos, her first collection and whether a writer from Florida is part of the Southern tradition. (You could also read van den Berg’s Year in Reading entry.)
●
●
Catstarter
“The most interesting writers we know, all asking and answering the same question: why can’t we stop watching cat videos?” Coffee House Press one-ups all boring Kickstarter campaigns with Catstarter, a campaign to fund a book on cat videos and “how we decide what is good or bad art, or art at all.”
●
●
DFW on Writing Nonfiction
“I’m not a journalist, and I don’t pretend to be one, and most of the pieces in there were assigned to me by Harper’s, with these sort of maddening instructions of, you know, just go to a certain spot and kind of, you know, turn 350 degrees a few times and tell us what you see.” Tom Scocca posts a five-part transcript of a phone interview he did with David Foster Wallace in February 1998. (Thanks, Nick.)
●
●
All Our Kids
Margaret Atwood wants to edit the Canadian national anthem. The MaddAddam author and Year in Reading alum thinks a phrase in the current lyrics — “true patriot love in all thy sons’ command” — needs to be changed to something more gender-neutral.
●
●
Irv Loathed NPR
Recommended Reading: A piece of new fiction by Joanthan Safran Foer! Go check out “Maybe It Was the Distance” over at The New Yorker. Here’s a review of Foer’s Tree of Codes by Kevin Nguyen for The Millions which calls the format of the book, “a wonderful experiment in what a book can be, and also home to a mediocre novel.”
●
●
You Can’t Go Home Again (If You Understand What This Means)
The 113th anniversary of Thomas Wolfe’s birthday was last Thursday, but the author lives on in America’s cultural memory thanks to the title of his 1940 novel, You Can’t Go Home Again. Unfortunately, the titular phrase seems to be taken at face value by many people these days, and that can lead to some groan-worthy invocations. A newly-minted Tumblr blog illustrates the point.