Why do some ideas only come to you when you’re under a tremendous amount of pressure? At the Ploughshares blog, S. Hope Mills reflects on the importance of deadlines, which may explain (according to Guardian columnist Robert Crum) why Dickens chose to serialize his novels.
With Time Running Out
The Scanner, Darkly
A used-book flipper, armed with a laser scanner and a PDA, delineates the unease he feels about the odd profession he has chosen.
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Someone’s Gotta Do It
If you’ve ever wondered how all those celebrity chefs can churn out so many cookbooks year after year, you should check out Julia Moskin’s confessions from a former “food ghost.”
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Huxley’s Closes His Doors of Perception
Doors of Perception author Aldous Huxley requested a dose of LSD as he succumbed to laryngeal cancer in 1963. Three weeks later, Huxley’s widow, Laura Archera, wrote a letter describing the experience (“the most beautiful death”) to her brother-in-law. Today the prescription of psychedelic drugs to terminally ill patients is less uncommon than you might expect.
The Long Road
On the occasion of the publication of his novel The Madonnas of Echo Park, Brando Skyhorse writes about the decades-long path that got him there and the rules for writing that he devised. (Thanks, Steve)
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The Latest in Obama Lit
Obama inclined readers looking for a swifter read than The Bridge should pick up the pithy new anthology of poems composed during President Obama’s first hundred days in office, Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days.
Hunger Games Madlibs
Happy Hunger Games! To celebrate the release of Catching Fire, read Ben Blatt’s textual analysis of the most popular adverbs, adjectives, and sentences used by Suzanne Collins in The Hunger Games trilogy, Stephenie Meyer in Twilight, and J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series. Unsurprisingly, the most popular sentence in Twilight is, “I sighed.” We’re sighing, too. Pair with: Our essay on how teen fantasy heroines need to grow up.
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Raised on B-Movies
I’ve loved old sci-fi B-movies forever, and a staggering number of my childhood memories involve Ray Harryhausen. For this reason, I’m really geeking out over The New Yorker’s entire science fiction issue, but in particular this piece by Colson Whitehead deserves your time.
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Polar Incentives
Depending on your political persuasion, this is either good news or bad news: Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel will jump in a freezing Lake Michigan if schoolchildren in his city read at least 2 million books this summer.
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