Recommended Reading: The Paris Review has put its Zadie Smith short story “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets” online. “New York just expects so much from a girl—acts like it can’t stand even the idea of a wasted talent or opportunity. And Miss Adele had been around.”
The Corset Cause
Sonya Chung on the Writing Life
Sonya Chung discusses her recent essay on the film Green Book, as well as how she deals with imposter syndrome as a writer.
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East of Edam
What goes better together than wine and cheese? Authors and cheese. The Airship paired ten gourmet cheeses with famous writers. Virginia Woolf goes well with a Bayley Hazen Blue. “This Stilton-like blue is a mix of narratives – the Mrs. Dalloway of cheeses, if you will.”
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Elena Ferrante’s Writing Process, Translated
“Patriarchal domination, even — despite appearances — in the West, is still very entrenched, and each of us, in the most diverse places, in the most varied forms, suffers the humiliation of being a silent victim or a fearful accomplice or a reluctant rebel or even a diligent accuser of victims rather than of the rapists. Paradoxically, I don’t feel that there are great differences between the women of the Neapolitan neighborhood whose story I told and Hollywood actresses or the educated, refined women who work at the highest levels of our socioeconomic system. ” In a rare interview, Elena Ferrante discuses the #meToo movement, Naples and her writing process for the Neapolitan novels in a rare interview translated from the original French.
Happy Birthday, Joseph Heller
“The morning after the opening sentence took shape, Heller “arrived at work”—at the Merrill Anderson Company—“with my pastry and container of coffee and a mind brimming with ideas, and immediately in longhand put down on a pad the first chapter of an intended novel.” The handwritten manuscript totaled about 20 pages. He titled it Catch-18. The year was 1953.” Happy Birthday Joseph Heller, author of the anti-war classic Catch-22, born this day in 1923 in Coney Island, New York.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Yuknavitch; Keyes; Rich; Pierpont; Hobbs; Johncock; Hall; Taseer; Waclawiak; Mitchell; Markovits; Bai; Keating; Lepucki
Out this week: The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch; The Woman Who Stole My Life by Marian Keyes; The Hand that Feeds You by A.J. Rich; Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont; Vanishing Games by Roger Hobbs; The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock; Speak by Louisa Hall; The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer; The Invaders by Karolina Waclawiak; Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell; You Don’t Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits; French Concession by Xiao Bai; The Captive Condition by Kevin P. Keating; and the paperback edition of our own Edan Lepucki’s California. For more on these and other new titles, check out our latest book preview.
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