Visual Editions wants to send photographer Jacob Robinson to La Mancha… by way of camper van. Along the way, he’ll be tasked with “captur[ing] the spirit of Don Quixote” on film and combining his shots with text from Miguel de Cervantes’s novel in order to create a re-imagined, “faithful and contemporary” edition. You can find out more on the effort’s Kickstarter page.
Visualizing Don Quixote
Lydia Davis, in Short
The Village Voice offers a pretty good briefing on the charms of Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories are out this week.
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The Published, Paralyzed Piglet
Chris P. Bacon is a young Floridian piglet that gets around these days by utilizing a makeshift wheelchair. He also just signed a three-book deal with the world’s largest self-help and motivational publisher.
Avoiding Unnecessary Punctuation
Over at The Washington Post, Jeff Guo makes a case against periods. As he puts it, “When we get excited, the pauses between our sentences shrink. We speak in run-ons. [...] A period feels too weighty.” Also check out this Millions piece on the benefits of excising quotation marks.
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“And then later how we were terrible again”
Recommended Reading: Guernica’s excerpt from Matt Bell’s upcoming novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods.
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On The (Separate) Road
"I always had the sneaking and sinking suspicion that there would have been no place for me ... there were no Scarlett O’Haras in the Beat world. There were women, certainly, but they felt like cardboard cut-outs, something to move around, admire, shift gently out of the way when necessary. In fact, the only women Kerouac and Ginsberg seemed to genuinely respect were their mothers." Lynette Lounsbury at The Guardian on falling in love with the Beat generation, which may or may not have loved her back.
Non Fiction Takes a Certain Vulnerability
We've recommended reading up on Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart before, this interview in Hazlitt is one of our favorites. "And maybe this is crude to talk about, it’s not even that I don’t want to write a memoir. Beyond that, do you understand how vulnerable it makes someone to call something nonfiction? Not just emotionally vulnerable but financially vulnerable, do you realize someone that makes $40,000 a year cannot be hit by a lawsuit by some angry ex who objected about a chapter about him? Some guy sees one line about him, missing thousands of lines not about him. That’s why celebrities are the ones who write memoirs."
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