At this point, we’re all familiar with Cheryl Strayed’s transformative solo hike of the Pacific Crest Trail that she wrote about in Wild. Yet at Condé Nast Traveler, she discusses how a recent family vacation to Laos reawakened her passion for travel. “Here we were on a sacred hill so far off from the place from which we had come, and so abundantly thankful for it. Perhaps the power of that very gratitude is the reason I travel.”
Vacationing with the Strayeds
Like Teacher
In The Guardian, Year in Reading alum Joshua Ferris writes a tribute to the novelist Jim Shepard, who taught him at UC Irvine when Ferris was a student there in the early aughts. Ferris makes a case that Shepard single-handedly settles a modern debate: “A lot of critics dislike the professionalisation of creative writing. They have never had Shepard in a workshop.”
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Stir Gently
Cookbooks, in general, are resistant to close reading, if only because their authors are barely present in the text, if at all. Yet sometimes we can discern a personality through the measurements and shopping lists. At Page-Turner, Kathleen Alcott reads the cookbooks of Nigel Slater. Pair with our own Hannah Gersen on reading cookbooks as literature.
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Flowers of Evil
“Life is worth less than a line of Baudelaire’s poetry.” These two lyric essays by Chen Li over at Asymptote Journal are economical and well-worth the read. Though Chen Li is from Taiwan, he writes in Chinese; this syllabus of Chinese writing and the “New China” from Casey Walker at The Millions pairs quite nicely.
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“Rainbow Potato Day” Has a Nice Ring
Gaia, Pale Blue Dot, Lonely Planet, etc… It’s time for a new addition to Earth’s list of aliases: the rainbow potato. A new map of our planet’s gravity field reveals the variations in gravitational pull depending on your geographic location.
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A Field Guide to A Field Guide
“It only took me 10 years to get the verb tenses right!” Our own Garth Risk Hallberg reflects on the process of updating his debut novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family, recently reissued in a new edition by Knopf. See also: our interview with him on the occasion of the release of his blockbuster City on Fire.
Splendid, Vibrant
Recommended Reading: Tolu Ogunlesi on how “Nigeria’s literary scene has burgeoned into this splendid, vibrant space.”
Ben Stiller’s Daydreams
Ben Stiller has taken on the fashion and film worlds before, but his next directorial effort is literary. The new trailer for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, based on the 1939 James Thurber short story, is more Michel Gondry than Derek Zoolander.
Are Instagram Poets Actually Poets?
For the Poetry Foundation, Timothy Yu considers in greater depth the significance of Instagram poets in the larger world of contemporary poetry.
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