Runaway…
Critiques for Charity
We've seen a lot of interesting literary fundraisers (and are still a bit in awe of Catstarter) but a recent campaign goes beyond the usual Kickstarter: a group of well-known American writers, from Heather McHugh to Philip Levine to Rebecca Makkai, will be selling manuscript critiques later this month to benefit Caregifted.org.
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Jay Gatsby, Iconic American
BBC's Tom Geoghegan asks whether or not The Great Gatsby is "the perfect tale for modern America."
The Orchid Read
"Writing gives me great feelings of pleasure. There’s a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It’s like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way. It’s very physical. I get antsy. I jiggle my feet a lot, get up a lot, tap my fingers on the keyboard, check my e-mail. Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it’s working and the rhythm’s there, it does feel like magic to me." Susan Orlean on why she writes.
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Ersatz Intellectualism
My favorite part of my apartment is my wall-length bookshelf. When I look at it, I think of all the time I spent reading and accumulating its contents. I feel I’ve earned it, which is why I’m slightly insulted by Juniper Books’ $3,000-$100,000 “collection-development service,” a program designed for “people who want a library but haven't had the time or inclination to amass a collection of books.”
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David Mamet Appliance Center
The “David Mamet Appliance Center” has some predictably abrasive customer service representatives. Here is Peter McCleery for McSweeney’s imagining a hilarious and existentially hopeless exchange between customer and technician. The Millions has even more to satisfy your fictitious-Mamet fix: an imagined symposium with Mamet, Francine Prose, and James Wood among others.
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