Runaway…
The Cows
A German cow named Yvonne escaped her impending trip to a slaughterhouse and soon became a national icon. In the wake of public outcry, officials have called off the search for her. Elsewhere, Lydia Davis is probably regretting that this story broke after she published her bovine chapbook The Cows.
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The Sleepy Short Story
Recommended Reading: Louise Erdrich’s new short story in The New Yorker, “The Big Cat,” which is about snoring among other things. “The women in my wife’s family all snored, and when we visited for the holidays every winter I got no sleep.” Deborah Treisman also interviewed Erdrich about the story. “I like the idea that this story reads like a fairy tale, but there is no moral at all, unless it’s Beware of Snoring Cats. Nothing I write ever has a moral.”
Schmidle’s Challenge
Nicholas Schmidle‘s riveting account of Seal Team Six’s Abbottabad raid was the highlight of this week‘s New Yorker. Yet he wrote the article without interviewing any of the team members. C. Christine Fair explains how he did it.
Jon-Jon Goulian gets another profile
For The Rumpus, Sari Botton interviews Jon-Jon Goulian to supplement his recent profile in The New York Times.
Unbreakable
Recommended reading: Wil S. Hylton profiles Laura Hillenbrand and the effects of chronic fatigue syndrome on her writing in a piece for The New York Times Magazine, just in time for the release of the film adaptation of Unbroken.
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We Need to Talk About Lionel
“Officials in charge of an Australian writers festival were so upset with the address by their keynote speaker, the American novelist Lionel Shriver, that they censored her on the festival website and publicly disavowed her remarks.” Dang. (We agree, it was pretty bad – she wore a sombrero for most of her speech.) Writers’ conferences: They’re intense.
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