Recommended Reading: Nicole Krauss’s new short story, “I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake,” at The New Republic. “My mother had died when I was three. We had already dealt with death, in our way we’d agreed to be finished with it. Then, without warning, my father broke our agreement.”
Fatherless Fiction
New Contest from Kirkus Reviews
To celebrate the 80th birthday of Kirkus Reviews, the editorial staff is holding a contest in which the grand prize winner gets a literary tour of New York City. This includes “two round-trip tickets to Manhattan, two nights’ stay at the Library Hotel, two passes to the Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl, gift certificates to several of the city’s finest independent bookstores, breakfast at a round table at the Algonquin Hotel, and dinner at Public in SoHo.”
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The Character of Retreat
Part Into the Wild, part Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Howard Axelrod’s The Point of Vanishing is the story of his two years spent in profound solitude in the Vermont wilderness. Called “torture” by prison rights activists and “a threat to mental stability” by psychologists, Axelrod’s decision to sequester himself from society was nothing if not extreme. Alexander Supertramp would be proud.
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The 7 Habits of Self-Help
“I have learned to consume them in secret, in my own home, reading them the way you would eat a bag of M&M’s that you keep stashed behind the kale chips.” Jake Tobin Garrett for Electric Literature about the allure of self-help books. See also:“Unleashing the Essence of Self-Help Books in Three Simple Steps.”
Word comics of the day
Recommended RSS-ing: A better word of the day from artist Tory Hoke, who pairs each unusual word with a hand-drawn comic. Friday’s entry, “spurcitious,” is charmingly defined in relation to a thumb and a hammer. Hate pictures? Other tried-and-true options include curators at Merriam-Webster, The New York Times, and this guy on Twitter.
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“I’m going to go jump off the Burnside Bridge”
Recommended Reading: Powell’s bookseller Kevin Sampsell’s piece about talking a customer out of committing suicide, only to then be plagued by the thought of killing himself afterward.
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This caught me off guard. The New Republic publishes fiction now? But now it makes sense: Krauss is the editor’s sister-in-law. This so perfectly represents the insularity and cronyism in American fiction these days. You just can’t make this stuff up.
Serious question: what about this story (and Krauss in general) led you to recommend it? It’s so unoriginal and insipid that I just can’t for the life of me understand why this piece, out of hundreds that are published every day, stands out. How would you define Krauss’ style? What sets her apart from other writers? What makes this story different than the “person dealing with a parent’s death” stories that are churned out daily in undergraduate workshops?
^^You realize you’re talking to an aggregator bot right?