Landlord, patron, gardener, traveler— Elizabeth Gilbert is so much more than a memoirist. Steve Almond profiles Gilbert for The New York Times and finds out about her return to fiction with her new novel, The Signature of All Things. Yet Gilbert doesn’t disparage her Eat, Pray, Love fame and readers, even if others do. “I want to say: ‘Go [expletive] yourself! You have no idea who the women are who read my books, and if I have to choose between them and you, I’m choosing them.’”
Eat, Pray, Write a Novel
Maya Angelou Has Died
Maya Angelou, poet and author of many memoirs -- most famously I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings -- has died at 86. This video of Angelou reading her poem "And Still I Rise" may serve as a good start to a celebration of her life.
Caught
"Were you happy? With Green it's likelier you were in love, attuned to the littlest differences, rapt at eventless descriptions that should be boring but aren't, in awe of the way a cut-rate bunch of flowers is described, interpreting each symbol as a sign, sickened when your interpretation failed." On the novels of Henry Green.
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Infinite Stupidity
Why innovate when you can just Google and copy? Mark Pagel on the perils of "being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet."
Double Sided
Two ways of looking at a book: "Had I been still more articulate, I might have said that there’s a special readerly pleasure in approaching a book as you would a box. In its self-containment lies its ferocious magic; you can see everything it holds, and yet its meagre, often hackneyed contents have a way of engineering fresh, refined, resourceful patterns. And Emily might have replied that she comes to a book as to a keyhole: you observe some of the characters’ movements, you hear a little of their dialogue, but then they step outside your limited purview. They have a reality that outreaches the borders of the page."
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Crime and Punishment
Johnny Depp’s latest film, Black Mass, which casts the star as Whitey Bulger, hit theaters on September 18th. At Publishers Weekly, author T. J. English argues that Where the Bodies Were Buried: Whitey Bulger and the World That Made Him is necessary to the canon of literature on Bulger, even if it's the 16th book about the mobster.
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New Hughes
A previously unpublished short story by Langston Hughes is now available online at The New Yorker. Pair with our own Emily Colette Wilkinson’s staff pick, Tambourines to Glory.
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Dispatch from the Jumex Factory
Recommended Listening: David Naimon interviews Valeria Luiselli about her novel The Story of my Teeth, literary tradition, and the writing process. Pair with Lily Meyer’s Millions review of the novel.
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‘Bout Goddamn Time
In The Guardian, Sam Leith reviews Holy Sh*t: A History of Swearing, a new book by Melissa Mohr. In it, Mohr argues that swearing just ain’t what it ****ing used to be, man.
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