Writers are told that they should outline their work. Elizabeth Gilbert has outdone us all by writing a 70-page outline for The Signature of All Things. “I have no German Romantic idea about work. There’s no fugue state, you know? I could no more write at 3 a.m. than I could with a quill pen. I keep farmer’s hours and I have that sort of plotting and plodding way,” she told The Daily Beast.
Outline Obsession
“David Shields = Canada”
At HTML Giant, Catherine Lacey interviews David Shields, who says that his new book, How Literature Saved My Life, drew material from his stated identity as a “highly self-conscious lab rat.” For more, you can read our own Mark O’Connell’s review of his book in the Times.
●
●
The New World hits virtual shelves
Chris Adrian’s The New World, a digital-platform book we wrote about before, is now on shelves. I mean that idiomatically and not literally — as none of the editions favored by The Atavist’s young publishing arm for this lyrical love story of life after death (interactive ebook app, text-only Kindle/iBook/Google) involve paper.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Gyasi; Alam; Schine; Rowley; King
Out this week: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi; Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam; They May Not Mean To, But They Do by Cathleen Schine; Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley; and End of Watch by Stephen King. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
●
●
The Cultural Logic of Margaret Atwood
Fredric Jameson reviews Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood for the London Review of Books.
●
●
Dispatch from Cuba
The May issue of Words Without Borders is now available online, featuring new speculative fiction from Cuba by Herson Tissert Pérez, Mylene Fernández Pintado, Ena Lucia Portela, and others.
●
●