Quilting Anew
Bernhard and Olive Garden
"You could say that Fancy is about a couple of comical old kooks stuck in a dismal town finding creative ways of making themselves (and some luckless bystanders) crazy … and you wouldn’t be wrong. But you could also say that it’s the story of the composition of the manifesto of a bizarre and protean (protozoan?) order of being in which we’re all just patterns mistaking ourselves for people." In a piece for BOMB Magazine, Scott Esposito interviews Jeremy M. Davies about Bernhard, Olive Garden, writing Fancy and reintroducing humor into modernist literature. Their conversation pairs well with our own Nick Ripatrazone's look at, well, the conversations of BOMB interviews.
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Let’s Get a Novelist to Write a Birth Scene Transmitted via Skype
This week, Allison K. Gibson looked into the “awkward but necessary role of technology in fiction,” and what it means to include it or overlook it in a given work of fiction. Similarly, what’s with the absence of birth scenes in literature?
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Place Your Bets
This year's Nobel in literature will be announced in early October, so there's still plenty of time to get in on the gambling! Currently leading in all the over/unders? Haruki Murakami, whose book covers we considered here.
Post-Apocalypse Now
"I’ve turned paranoid lately. When I’m in an airport, I look at the people around me at the gate, trying to suss out who might make a good ally if things went bad. I carry two plastic tubs full of warm clothes, hiking boots, and first-aid supplies in the back of my Subaru at all times. I have as large a volume of canned and dry goods in my pantry and laundry room as the shelves will hold." Rebecca Onion for Slate on the appeal and contagion of "prepper fiction." Pair with our review of Claire Vaye Watkins's Gold Fame Citrus, one of the recent bumper crop of apocalyptic narratives.
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A Drawn Out Illustration
Twelve days after Gustave Flaubert died, a friend cataloged the writer’s personal effects. 48,311 days later, Joanna Neborsky illustrated them.
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Olive Kitteridge on HBO
Soon HBO will have another show based on an acclaimed book in its lineup. Olive Kitteridge, a show based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Elizabeth Strout, will premiere on November 2nd. You can see the trailer (along with a brief analysis) over at Slate. FYI, Strout wrote a Year in Reading entry for us.
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Thank You for Your Submission
If you’re a writer planning to submit a novel manuscript to a literary agency, you might want to read these guidelines and recommendations, over at Electric Literature. Pair with Edan Lepucki’s Millions interview with her agent about publishing a first book.
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