One of the surprises of last week’s James Beard Awards was the runaway success of McSweeney’s offshoot Lucky Peach, which ended up taking home five out of seventeen awards. On John Birdsall’s Tumblr, you can read one of the winning essays, which bears the attention-grabbing title of “America, Your Food Is So Gay.” (Related: Jessica Ferri on food writing.)
Born Lucky
Summer Oysters
You’re only supposed to consume oysters in months with the letter “r” in their English (and French) names. This is because oysters in the Northern hemisphere are more likely to spoil during the warmer months of May, June, July, and August. So if you can’t eat ‘em, you might as well hear about ‘em instead, right? Presenting this video of Seamus Heaney reading his poem, “Oysters” (Text here).
“Train time is found time.”
After earning herself a “test run” writer’s residency aboard an Amtrak train, Jessica Gross reflects on the virtues and benefits of writing by railcar. Meanwhile, Alexander Chee announces he’ll be writing on the rails from New York City to Portland this Spring. You can read some more information about the program over here.
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“PV”
After sixteen years of work, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, "the world’s only celebrity translation team," have finally finished translating all of Tolstoy, ending with last fall's Hadji Murat. Humanities interviews them, and back in 2009, so did we.
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The Tables Have Turned
First humans wrote poems made of computer code, and now computers are writing poems made of English words.
Draw Hard
Harold and the Purple Crayon is a classic children’s book. Is it also a writing guide? In an essay for Bookslut, Mairead Case explains why she re-reads it whenever she’s finishing a project: the main character’s need to create a room for himself is a corollary to the writing process.
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“An index also lays out the complexity of the book into pristine statements”
In a neat little essay for Vouched Books, Kyle Winkler advocates indexing as a means of tempering the "fuckstorm of reading."
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Before the Fall
Calling a book “the spiritual prequel to The Road” is a great way to signal its command of dystopian tropes. It’s what Gabe Durham wrote about Maxwell Neely-Cohen’s recent YA novel Echo of the Boom. At The Rumpus, Durham interviews Neely-Cohen, who describes how he tried to give a metafictional bent to the novel. Related: we asked high school students to pick their favorite YA books of 2013.
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