Recommended Reading: Kate Manning on the “slumgullions” of English.
“Linguistic loot”
“That’s Just My Life and It Seems Quite Normal to Me.”
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Lynda Barry on the Painted Novel
“I came back to my studio and tried to think of the slowest possible way to write a novel, and the slowest way is with frosting.” The Paris Review interviews cartoonist Lynda Barry about writing novels with a paintbrush.
The Essay Crown
Could James Baldwin be America’s greatest essayist? Ta-Nehisi Coates believes so — at The Atlantic, he argues that The Fire Next Time shows Baldwin committing “amazing acts of intellectual and emotional courage.” (Related: Buzz Poole paid tribute to Baldwin back in 2008.)
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Letter to Harlem
Over at Catapult, Morgan Jerkins writes on calling Harlem home. As she puts it, “Blackness is not one specific characteristic. It is many things, things that I have yet to discover. It means that different variations of blackness can find home in one another.”