Even though James McBride (new National Book Award winner for The Good Lord Bird) is an accomplished jazz musician, he doesn’t listen to any music while writing. “Because I’m a musician, listening to music is…it’s a bit like work for me,” he told The Daily Beast for the “How I Write” series.
Writing on Mute
True Tragedy
“The way this propaganda works is you take something insane and wrap it in a little bit of truth, and then all those people swallow it because it’s wrapped in a little bit of truth.” Columbia Journalism Review talks to the victims of fake news, from Sandy Hook parents to election overseers. Also worth thinking about in this context, the American usage of modern English.
Charles Darwin’s Interest in “Neuropsychiatric Photography”
In the late 1860s, James Crichton-Browne, director of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, gave Charles Darwin a collection of photographic portraits depicting the “afflicted and insane.” What followed was a six-year relationship in which both men corresponded about “the physical manifestations of natural selection.”
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Definitive Proof that Everything’s Better in an Irish Accent
Here’s a recording of Colum McCann reading the opening lines of the Amazon Editors’ list of June’s “10 Best Books of the Month”
Lorin Stein Named Editor of the Paris Review
Garth recently posited that Dave Eggers would be a great, if counter-intuitive, replacement for Philip Gourevitch at the Paris Review. Instead, the Paris Review has announced today the equally admirable appointment of FSG editor Lorin Stein to head up the venerable literary magazine. The announcement.
Appearing Elsewhere
Our regular contributor Sonya Chung is interviewed in the latest issue of Bookslut, discussing her new book Long for This World. “I write novels because it’s a place where I can bring all of who I am, and what I know, and what I don’t know but want to know, into a coherent, created world.”
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Two-Step
You may have heard that War of the Encyclopaedists is one of those rare novels written by multiple authors. Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite worked together to write their debut. In The Guardian, our own Emily St. John Mandel takes a look.
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