How do you become a writer? The Los Angeles Times asked 200 writers participating in their Festival of Books how they got started and created a board game based on their responses. Roll the die to find out if you’ll be a successful writer or not.
The Writing Life Game
Reading Lolita at Twelve
At the Paris Review Daily, Nick Antosca reminisces on reading Lolita at 12: “Who among my seventh-grade classmates, I wondered with a frisson, was such a creature? What girl had that ‘soul-shattering, insidious charm’ that, while invisible to me, made the antennae of certain adult males tremble?”
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Revisiting Olive with Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout discusses the surprising popularity of Olive Kitteridge, and why she revisited the character in her new book, Olive, Again.
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Jennifer Egan and Personal Writing
Jennifer Egan recently spoke with Willing Davidson, fiction editor of The New Yorker, as part of Rewiring the Real, a yearlong series of podcasts with writers about the interplay of literature, technology and religion. Rachel Hurn, a former Millions intern, was there and noted Egan’s ambivalence towards “personal writing.” [Updated to correct the quote] “If writing necessarily meant writing about myself, then I’d rather do something else,” Egan said.
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The Point Issue 9: On Art, Commerce, and the Prescience of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
New at The Point: an incisive look at Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis that calls it “the most prescient American novel of the past fifteen years” and asks,”is it possible to mount any meaningful resistance to capitalism on the level of culture?” The latest print issue features this essay as well as a symposium on privacy, and will be launched at a release party in Hyde Park on Saturday night.
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