Recommended Reading: Laura Van Prooyen’s poem at The Missouri Review “Location: Frances.” “When I say Frances, I mean a woman. I mean/a place. The dead cling to the land.”
Finding Frances
Following the Refugees
Foreign Policy tracks refugees on their journey from Syria to Germany and illustrates their trip in a nonfiction comic.
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Tim Weiner Knows Every Secret Ever
Tim Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Then, four years after its publication, he received a box of J. Edgar Hoover's "personal files on [FBI] intelligence operations between 1945 and 1972" from a well-connected D.C. lawyer. That treasure trove of information has since wound up in his recently published book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, and he sat with NPR's Terry Gross to talk all about it.
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How to Write Like a Man
“She can write like a man, they said, by which they meant, She can write.” Claire Vaye Watkins writes for Tin House about the problem that has no name. Also check out this Millions piece on sexism in the age of the internet.
The links
The Telegraph links all their reviews of Booker longlist titles from one page. If you want to get a look at these literary hotshots, there's a photo gallery, too.Ed has read Chuck Klosterman, and he's not very happy about it.The First Post, a new British online magazine leads with John Irving's book reviewer-bashing.
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It’s Okay, I Guess
If your default mood hovers between melancholy and despair, you may be cheered (or at least made a bit less glum) by this argument that striving for happiness is bad for us in the long run. Mari Ruti makes the case that a “happy, balanced life” depends in large part on a kind of emotional numbness.
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Dubliners, 100 Years Later
At Flavorwire Jonathan Sturgeon considers what we've learned from Dubliners in the hundred years since it was first published and argues that "when it comes to realism, Dubliners, more than even Chekhov’s short fiction, is the model we routinely fail to live up to." Sturgeon's reflections on Joyce's free indirect discourse pair well with Jonathan Russell Clark's Millions essay on close writing, and his essay isn't completely without hope: he concludes with a few books that, "on the surface, look nothing like Dubliners, but, in spirit... show that Joyce’s book still lives 100 years on."