Maclean’s has an excerpt from Chris Hadfield’s forthcoming memoir, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth.
Stellar Memoir
New Short Story by DFW
“Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.” The New Yorker posts a new short story, “Backbone,” by David Foster Wallace.
I want to feel what I feel. Even if it’s not happiness
Toni Morrison gives a devastating interview in The Guardian.
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Writing Literary Twitter
“Reading Literary Twitter is to witness brief, terse glimpses into the writerly psyche, and how insecure and unsure and thin-skinned we tend to be. As writers, we want to be validated. We want to matter. The published stories and poems and essays, the books we sell, the magazines we edit: all this output, this paper expelled out to the world, the screens we invade with our narratives, it all matters to us. But does it matter to everyone else?” mensah demary writes about the good, the bad, and the slightly neurotic of being a writer on Twitter for Electric Literature.
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We Just Turn to the Comics
In the NYRB, a new article on Chris Ware, accompanied by an old joke — dreamt up by none other than Gore Vidal — that a hypothetical New York Review of Comic Books might replace its eponymous predecessor. Last week, our own Mark O’Connell reviewed Mr. Ware’s latest book.
New Richard Powers Story Available As an eBook
National Book Award-Winning author of The Echo Maker Richard Powers has a new story out, “Genie“, as an ebook original.
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Catstarter
“The most interesting writers we know, all asking and answering the same question: why can’t we stop watching cat videos?” Coffee House Press one-ups all boring Kickstarter campaigns with Catstarter, a campaign to fund a book on cat videos and “how we decide what is good or bad art, or art at all.”
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It’s Not Nothing
We’ve published a fair number of essays about the writing process and its discontents. In Bookforum, Anne Boyer tackles the natural complement to literary work, in an excerpt of her new Garments Against Women. Her subject? The art of not writing.
A Quintet of Interviews for Your Delectation
Anya Ulinich, author of Petropolis, talks to World Literature Today: “What else can a person do when she gets home after a ten-hour work day – with a toothache that she can’t afford to fix . . . – but fall on the couch and watch whatever is in front of her face?” . . . Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories is just out, talks to Sarah Manguso for The Believer: “At the origin of the work there has to be strong feeling, if it’s going to be any good. Of course, that strong feeling can be a delight in language.” . . . The Book Bench unearths a 1978 John Updike interview with a Croation periodical, which finds the Rabbit Angstrom author halfway through his tetralogy. . . . Edwin Frank of NYRB Classics talks to Omnivoracious, and selects his favorite books in the series (via). . . . And James Ellroy submits to interrogation at The Paris Review: “I was always thinking about how I would become a great novelist.”
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