“I’d grown up watching and playing baseball.”
Queens of the Short Story
It’s high time we acknowledge the mastery of the short story by some really fantastic American women. At LitHub, Bridget Read makes a compelling case for such writers as Lucia Berlin and Jamaica Kincaid as veritable dons of the genre. This piece pairs nicely with a recent Millions essay by Adam Boffa on terseness, Twitter, and Lydia Davis.
●
●
War and Peace and the Gita
Recommended reading: The New York Review of Books reviews at Richard Davis‘s The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography and the way centuries of politics can alter our interpretations of religious texts.
●
●
Leigh Stein’s Other People Pod
The Fallback Plan (reviewed on our site) and Dispatch from the Future author Leigh Stein was interviewed for Brad Listi’s Other People Podcast, so that makes us all winners.
●
●
Getting Millayed
Recommended Reading: Meryl Cates of The Paris Review gets Millayed in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s gardens at Steepletop, the New England-style farmhouse where the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet worked and played. Pair with this essay from The Millions on reading writers’ houses.
Lend Me Talent
Last Friday marked the feast day of Francis de Sales, better known as the patron saint of writers and journalists. The saint, who lived in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, got his title thanks to his propensity for using flyers and pamphlets to convert people to Catholicism. At The Paris Review Daily, Dan Piepenbring reads the saint’s most famous work, Introduction to the Devout Life.
●
●
Read, Watch, Binge
As a part of their Read, Watch, Binge! summer series, NPR recommends TV series, movies, books, and more based on 60 of their readers favorite books. If you’re looking for more books, check out our Great Second-Half Fiction Preview.
●
●
Lydia Millet, Dark Princess of Love
Lydia Millet’s most recent novel, Magnificence, is the third in a trilogy, and a reminder of what a significant body of work she’s been building over the last decade. The Point offers the best overview of that work you’re likely to find anywhere. Millet’s “equal parts” Ben Marcus and Jonathan Franzen, writes Tom Dibblee, “but really she’s her own thing.”
●
●