Recommended Reading: Isle of Youth author Laura van den Berg’s story, “Where Will All the Buildings Go?”
“That city in the backseat.”
Fighting Words
At WBUR’s Modern Love podcast, actress Alysia Reiner (Orange Is The New Black, How To Get Away With Murder) reads author Laura Munson’s essay “Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear” from her memoir This Is Not The Story You Think It Is.
Fact-checking Steinbeck
As John Steinbeck’s classic Travels With Charley nears the half-century mark, a writer has retraced the author’s cross-country journey and come to the conclusion that the resulting book was full of inaccuracies and outright fabrications. The journalist Bill Steigerwald, whose article appears in the current issue of the libertarian quarterly Reason, says he didn’t set out to trash the Nobel laureate. “As a libertarian, I kind of liked the old guy,” Steigerwald tells the New York Times. “He liked guns; he liked property rights.”
The Starship Lands
Sarah Blake has completed her twelve-part illustrated epic poem, The Starship, at Berfrois. Pair with our essay on why Americans read poetry but won’t buy poetry books.
Writing Mirrors
“Here is the trouble with looking for ourselves in the writers whose works we admire, at least if we are proposing to be their biographers. For if we are in search of ourselves, or in this case our own troubled teenaged selves roaming New York, then we are apt to downplay those parts of the life that don’t correspond with that need for recognition.” Anne Boyd Rioux writes about biography and the distance, good or bad, between subject and biographer for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Stop Reading this Post Right Now
Get off the internet and read a book. Research has shown that deep reading (slow, immersive reading) is like an exercise for our brains that can enable us to be more empathetic.