If, while sitting in a writing class, you’ve ever looked around at your classmates and thought, “Dear Lord, these people are navel-gazers,” you might want to know that British researchers have found evidence that you were right.
I’m the Best One Here
Reading a Video Game
The modern maestros of fantasy at Bethesda Softworks penned thousands of pages of text for the Elder Scrolls series, scattering 256 detail-packed, in-game books across 2006’s Oblivion, with a commensurate amount in 2002’s Morrowind. Presumably these tomes were consumed by the hardcore few. Did Bethesda spend countless hours of careful word-crafting for a fanatical minority?
“The old songs are so easily lost.”
Pulphead author John Jeremiah Sullivan discusses Don Wahle’s Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard box set for The Paris Review in a quick piece that makes you sad he ever left The Oxford American.
The Black Woman Writer
“Women writers and writers of color don’t really have the luxury of being known simply as writers. There’s always a qualification,” Roxane Gay writes for The Nation. She ponders what it means to be a “black woman writer” and concludes that we should view diversity as a search for “urgent, unheard stories.”
●
●
Shepard’s Final Word
“He wrote the first drafts by hand, and when that became too difficult, dictated sections of the book into a tape recorder.” Before his death in July, playwright and actor Sam Shepard wrote a novel called Spy of the First Person, which is forthcoming from Knopf in December. From our archives, a list of writers who also act.
To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway
Aaron Sorkin is writing the first Broadway production of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. To prepare, Michael Bourne’s essay introduces us to the real Atticus Finch.