At the Ploughshares blog, Erinrose Mager interviews Year in Reading alum Rick Moody, who talks about his classes at NYU and why he prefers “the mentorship model” of teaching writing over the workshop model. (Related: our founder C. Max Magee reviewed Moody’s book The Diviners back in 2006).
That One Verboten Phrase
The Bronte Adventures
13-year-old Charlotte Brontë and her brother Branwell wrote adventure books in 2-inch books they sewed themselves. The results are exactly as adorable as you imagine. (Pair with our own essay on the sisters’ beginnings.)
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Reading Lolita at Twelve
At the Paris Review Daily, Nick Antosca reminisces on reading Lolita at 12: “Who among my seventh-grade classmates, I wondered with a frisson, was such a creature? What girl had that ‘soul-shattering, insidious charm’ that, while invisible to me, made the antennae of certain adult males tremble?”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Canin; Jansma; Majka; Griffin; Kennedy; Perabo; Dacey; Montes
Out this week: A Doubter’s Almanac by Ethan Canin; Why We Came to the City by Kristopher Jansma; Cities I’ve Never Lived In by Sara Majka; Hide by Matthew Griffin; The Blue Hour by Douglas Kennedy; Why They Run The Way They Do by Susan Perabo; We’ve Already Gone This Far by Patrick Dacey; and Perfect Days by Raphael Montes. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
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Icon and Author
Louis Menand, Thessaly La Force, Amelia Lester, and David Haglund have come together to discuss the influence of literary powerhouse and cultural icon Joan Didion in The New Yorker’s Out Loud Podcast. Our own Michael Bourne calls Didion America’s Truth Teller in his review of her biography.
A Poetic Comeback
Jennifer Hizaji takes a look at the recent rise in poetry's popularity in the United States, the first increase in readers since about 2002.
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From Day Job to Night Job
“The idea came to Mr. Mallory one night as he sat on his couch watching an old favorite, Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a lamp switch on in the apartment across the street.” Published under a pseudonym, former executive editor Daniel Mallory‘s debut novel The Woman in the Window was acquired and published by his own imprint. Pair with: an essay about the emergence of “reimagined thrillers” that create characters out of setting.
I “Love” This.
I’m glad someone started this blog of unnecessary quotations marks for me. (via @narrativemag).
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