The last meal is a curious staple of modern executions, not least because it involves, in the words of one death-row inmate, “putting gas in a car that don’t have no motor.” At Lapham’s Quarterly, an essay on the ritual’s history, one that includes mention of famous last meals like terminally ill French President Francois Mitterrand’s final dinner of “Marennes oysters, foie gras, and two ortolan songbirds.”
One Last Taste
Unlocking the Doors
How does Karl Ove Knausgaard delve into some of the oldest parts of his memory for his writing? “I remember every single room that I have been in from the age of seven. What I did was to place myself in those rooms, and when I started to write about them it was like unlocking a thousand small doors, all leading further into childhood,” he told Cressida Leyshon at The New Yorker. Knausgaard also has a story, “Come Together” (behind the paywall), in the current issue. Pair with: Our essay on My Struggle.
Lambda Literary Award Names 2019 Finalists
Whittled down from a pool of 1,000 submissions, the finalists for the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards—which highlight and celebrate LBGTQ literature—include Akwaeke Emezi, Joseph Cassara, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Patrick Nathan, and Jordy Rosenberg.
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“The point is she’s doing ballet badly”
As part of their Sunday Interview series, The Rumpus had a chat with Leslie Jamison, who talked to Martha Bayne about The Empathy Exams, the ubiquity of Frozen and the pathos of Taylor Swift. If you like, you could also take a look at our own Edan Lepucki’s interview with Jamison, or else read Ryan Teitman’s review of The Empathy Exams.
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Raven Leilani on the Vulnerability of Hope
Raven Leilani discusses her much-anticipated debut novel, Luster, the product of years of balancing work and art.
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Non Fiction Takes a Certain Vulnerability
We’ve recommended reading up on Jenny Zhang‘s Sour Heart before, this interview in Hazlitt is one of our favorites. “And maybe this is crude to talk about, it’s not even that I don’t want to write a memoir. Beyond that, do you understand how vulnerable it makes someone to call something nonfiction? Not just emotionally vulnerable but financially vulnerable, do you realize someone that makes $40,000 a year cannot be hit by a lawsuit by some angry ex who objected about a chapter about him? Some guy sees one line about him, missing thousands of lines not about him. That’s why celebrities are the ones who write memoirs.”
Formative Pancakes
“Everything I learned about writing, I learned from watching people.” David Sedaris talks with The Rumpus about IHOP and his newly published collection of diary entries Theft by Finding.