“Every writer needs an editor, and anyone who says he doesn’t has a fool for a muse.” The New York Times interviews journalists on the importance of editors, and it’s well worth the short read. Pair with our own Edan Lepucki‘s conversation with her editor.
“Every writer needs an editor”
“Banned Books Through History”
This week in book-related infographics: A look at “Banned Books Through History.”
●
●
A Literary Trip
Boyhood Tales
Random House is releasing a collection of previously unpublished poems and stories from Truman Capote’s youth, recently found in the archives of the New York Public Library. Over at Full Stop, Jacob Kiernan examines the keen political conscience in Capote’s never-before-published work. As he explains it, “While his early stories are structurally simple, they evince a prescient social conscience.”
●
●
Magical Journalism
“But where Smiley condescended, others were enthralled. Salmon Rushdie waxed lyrical, John Updike found it ‘stunning,’ Susan Sontag hosted him at dinner parties. Gabriel Garcia Marquez dubbed him, simply, ‘the Master’ – high praise from the founder of magical realism, but Kapuściński seemed to one-up Garcia Marquez by injecting magic into real politics, and elucidating thereby the human tension and bewilderment connected to power that traditional journalism left hidden.” Ryszard Kapuściński: novelist? Journalist? Or something else entirely?
Not Very Titillating
Those of you who know the joy of reading romance novels with your friends have probably wondered at some point what people who write erotica are like. Are they bankers and professionals? Housewives and mistresses? Are they some combination of all of the above? At Slate, a chaste look at the lives of unchaste writers.
●
●
Listening to Poems
At The Rumpus, Darcie Dennigan pens a strange and beautiful review of G.C. Waldrep’s new collection of poetry, Archicembalo: “I dreamt that G.C. Waldrep was offering me a tumbler of Pepsi, and amid the soda bubbles were many pills.”