After earning herself a “test run” writer’s residency aboard an Amtrak train, Jessica Gross reflects on the virtues and benefits of writing by railcar. Meanwhile, Alexander Chee announces he’ll be writing on the rails from New York City to Portland this Spring. You can read some more information about the program over here.
“Train time is found time.”
Foundry Lit
Black Country, the debut book of poetry by Liz Berry, won this year’s Forward prize for best first collection. At The Guardian, Ben Wilkinson writes about the ways in which the book “digs deep into the poet’s West Midlands roots, enlivening and reimagining the heritage of that eponymous heartland of iron foundries, coal mines and steel mills, on both personal and public footings.”
He Even Chose His Own Ending, In A Way
Some folks were abuzz this week about the release of all 47 endings to Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms. That kind of commitment to a single story is impressive, and illustrates the author’s dedication to his work, but as Andrew O’Hagan points out in the London Review of Books, Big Papa loved no story so much as his own.
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Questions from the Archives
Jenn Shapland had the pleasure of cataloguing the archives of Carson McCullers, Gertrude Stein, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Their possessions left her with a few lingering questions. Pair with Shapland’s piece on cataloguing David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.
Young Lions Fiction Award Finalists
The New York Public Library announced their eighteenth annual Young Lions Fiction Award, which is “given annually to an American writer age 35 or younger for either a novel or a collection of short stories.” The 2018 finalists are: Lesley Nneka Arimah‘s What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Venita Blackburn‘s Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, Gabe Habash‘s Stephen Florida, Emily Ruskovich‘s Idaho, and Jenny Zhang‘s Sour Heart. From our archives: Habash and Zhang‘s 2017 Year in Reading entries.
See Spot Run
Is there any animal more noble than your beloved childhood pet? In this moving essay from 3:AM Magazine, Adrian Nathan West explains a couple of lessons that he learned about love and devotion from his Labrador named Jake.
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