In mid-January, ten days after moving to California, Geoff Dyer suffered a stroke while throwing away trash in his new home. At the hospital, he recovered quickly, but the incident left him “conscious that the ground could open Adairishly beneath my feet at any moment.” In the LRB, he writes about the experience. (Related: Dyer wrote two Year in Reading entries for The Millions.)
“Any given moment”
Franzen on HBO’s The Corrections
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Scrappy Little Nobody
Anna Kendrick (Into the Woods, Pitch Perfect) is releasing a collection of essays, Scrappy Little Nobody, this November. If it’s anything like her Twitter, I’m sure we’ll be laughing. For fans of Kendrick, check out our own Sonya Chung’s review of Up in the Air.
Exhausted by Celebrity
"Readers have grown tired of the slew of celebrity memoirs," reports The Guardian. "About time," we say.
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A Curious Ambivalence
Colin Dickey for Hazlitt has written a fascinating essay exploring the myth and superstition behind the ritual veiling of mirrors while in mourning. Did our own Sonya Chung cover her mirror while she mourned the passing of Mad Men?
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DFW PSA
PSA: The ebook of Infinite Jest now goes for just $4.99. (Might just be a limited time thing.)
Times: New Film and Book Claim Five New J.D. Salinger Books to Be Published Starting in 2015
The Times is reporting that a new film and companion book (Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno) "include detailed assertions that Mr. Salinger instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books — some of them entirely new, some extending past work — in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015." One of the books is said to include a retooled version of Salinger's unpublished (but available at the Princeton library) story "The Last and Best of the Peter Pans." Kristopher Jansma (The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards) wrote about the story for us in 2011. Bonus Link: Garth Risk Hallberg on Salinger's legacy.
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Self-Publishing like a Woolf
"History is littered with poets... who set up their own presses to publish their work, because it was so different from the normal forms of the time. Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard are one example- they started their own press called the Hogarth Press (it is still going today) to publish collections of their work." Self-publishing is something we've written about many times before, but Sarah Gonnet raises a good point - self-publishing isn't truly a new phenomenon, and it does allow for a great deal of creative freedom.
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