Francine Prose has an idiosyncratic theory that the Hindu god Ganesh is a vital part of her writing process. In a VQR essay, she explains that her portrait of the deity (which she purchased forty years ago at a bazaar in Mumbai) gives her a kind of confidence that goes beyond superstition. As support for this belief, she points out that Ganesh is known in some quarters as “the writer’s god.”
Patron Half-Elephant
Waxwing Debuts
Waxwing, a new literary journal, has published its first issue online. The journal’s editors state that their mission is “to include American writers from all cultural identities — in terms of race, ethnicity, indigenous tribe, gender, class, sexuality, age, education, ability, language, religion, and region — alongside international voices, published bilingually.”
Long lazy gainfully-employed summer
Recommended reading: “I am seventeen years old, and getting drunk is still a novelty. It has only recently occurred to me that my mother won’t think to check my breath if I’m coming straight home from work.” An amazing reminisce of summer employment from The Rumpus. Pair with: The New Yorker on why summer makes us lazy, and an ice-cold beer.
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Cuba’s Newest Voices
Recommended Reading: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo collected sixteen short stories from sixteen authors among Cuba’s “Generación Año Cero” (Generation Year Zero), which is a “movement of writers who began publishing in 2000.” The anthology, which is available for free online in both English and Spanish, features illustrations from Cuban artists El Sexto and Luis Trápaga.
There Is No Real Life
If you enjoyed Bill Morris’s review of The Book of My Lives, Aleksandar Hemon’s latest collection of essays, then you’ll really like this interview with Hemon over at Guernica.
The Trouble With Memoirs
“If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.” Neil Genzlinger at the New York Times lays some ground rules for those compelled to write memoirs.
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Type Wars
For everyone who likes typography and arguments, New York Magazine has a story up that covers the type designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones and follows the pair through their success to their ultimate rift. For those who prefer debates with more immediate impact, Mental Floss has a breakdown of the best shots fired in the fight over the Oxford Comma.
Don DeLillo’s Secret (Seventh) Book
Don DeLillo’s seventh book was his first big hit, but you’d never know it from looking at the work’s cover or title page. That’s because he wrote Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League under the pseudonym, Cleo Birdwell. (Bonus: DeLillo’s 2009 story, “Midnight in Dostoevsky” was released from the New Yorker archive this week.)
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