Hilary Mantel is going from the brutal politics of the Tudors to the Thatcher era. Her next book will be a collection of short stories about Margaret Thatcher called The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and is due out in September.
The Iron Lady Lit
Don’t Let Amy Tan Walk All Over You
Sometimes things get a little kinky at Rock Bottom Remainders shows, the little known rock band with some big members including Amy Tan, Stephen King, and Dave Barry. Tan’s signature song is “These Boots are Made for Walking.” “For ‘Boots’ I’m especially gifted. I wield a whip and at the end of the song, I tell the boys to bend over,” she told The Daily Beast for a “How I Write” interview.
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Thomas Pynchon: The Video Game
“Inherent Vice . . . is like a novelization of Grand Theft Auto, claims Nerd World. And hey, they’ve got ten points of comparison to back it up, so you know it must be true. (via)
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In Kanye Land
What happens when you put one of the biggest literary egos together with music’s biggest ego? A movie. Bret Easton Ellis is working with Kanye West on a film. “He came and asked me to write the film,” Ellis told Vice. “I didn’t want to at first. Then I listened to Yeezus…I thought, regardless of whether I’m right for this project, I want to work with whoever made this.” This is an interesting pairing because Kanye definitely isn’t a reader.
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Garth Greenwell’s Rules for Weathering the Artist’s Life
Over at Lit Hub, Garth Greenwell shares his commencement speech for Bennington College, in which he shares his "seven very opinionated thoughts "on weathering the artist's life.
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Familiar Ground
What’s “Appropriate”
We’ve been following the YA debate quite attentively – I wrote about it just last week – but Sarah Burnes‘s addition to the conversation, a blog post for The Paris Review, is one of the most eloquent I’ve read. In defense of reading YA fiction as a “grown-up” she writes, “The binary between children’s and adult fiction is a false one, based on a limited conception of the self. I have not ceased to be the person I was when I was an adolescent; in fact, to think so seems to me like a kind of dissociation from a crucial aspect of one’s self. And the critic should be concerned with what is good and what is bad, what is art and what is not—not with what’s ‘appropriate.'”
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Standing on the Bridge of Grief
Over at Catapult, Benjamin Wood writes about his eulogy for his grandfather, which led to his writing of The Ecliptic. As he puts it, “Or maybe, in this time of grieving, I was thinking only with my heart until my head began to listen. Today, it seems as though the entirety of The Ecliptic was held within my consciousness before I ever glimpsed a piece of it, and grief was what enabled me to notice.” Pair with Nagihan Haliloğlu’s Millions review of the novel.
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