After the Times Magazine published their interview with Roxane Gay — in which the Bad Feminist author and Year in Reading alum delves into the title of her latest book and talks about her love of Sweet Valley High — the crew at McSweeney’s dug up a humor piece the author published in 2010. If you can read the title without laughing, you are more stoic than I am: “I Am Going to Cook a Quiche in My Easy-Bake Oven and You Are Going to Like It.”
Bad Feminist, Good Quiche
By Heart
“Everyone says Anna Karenina is about individual desire going against society, but I actually think the opposite is stronger: the way societal forces limit the expression of the individual.” Here is Mary Gaitskill on Anna Karenina for The Atlantic’s By Heart series, in which writers reflect on some of their favorite passages in all of literature. We’ve brought you a bit on By Heart here, here, and here.
One Greater Man Restore Us
Behold a video of Seamus Heaney reading lines from Paradise Lost.
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Guy Fawkes Night
“Remember, Remember the Fifth of November / Gunpowder, treason, and plot.” Edward Casey of Electric Literature recalls childhood memories of the strange, lawless, primal, pagan celebration of Guy Fawkes Night–and readers around the world grow jealous.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Coetzee; Li; Enriquez; Hoffman; Hogan; Puchner; Shepard
Out this week: The Schooldays of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee; Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li; Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez; Running by Cara Hoffman; The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan; Last Day On Earth by Eric Puchner; and The World to Come by Jim Shepard. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Hugo Lindgren’s AMA
Hugo Lindgren, editor of The New York Times Magazine, participated in a pretty nifty Reddit Ask Me Anything installment. When one commenter asked him how long it takes to prepare each week’s Meh List, Lindgren wrote, “The Meh list never stops. The actual compilation of it is lickety split but the hunt for Meh is eternal.” He also admitted that two of his favorite magazine stories are Mark Jacobson’s “Night-Shifting for the Hip Fleet” and John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” [Reg. Req.].
Jon Cotner’s Floating World
As part of the River to River Festival, poet Jon Cotner has put together a “floating world,” or a map of Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō’s work transposed onto Rockefeller Park. Each hour, Cotner will lead a tour through the world. This isn’t the first time Cotner’s done something cool like this, either. Check out our dispatch from his “Poem Forest” last year.
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The Extreme Edge of Experience
Year in Reading alumna Sarah Manguso writes about motherhood, writing, and the disintegration of the self in a moving essay for Harper’s. As she puts it, “I want to read books that were written in desperation, by people who are disturbed and overtaxed, who balance on the extreme edge of experience. I want to read books by people who are acutely aware that death is coming and that abiding love is our last resort.” Pair with Jaime Green’s Millions review of Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary.
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Walking Into the Book
Recommended Reading: The New York Times’s feature on Dana Spiotta. “When Dana Spiotta was working on her fourth novel, Innocents and Others, she sat beneath a huge bulletin board pinned with her sticky notes and research materials: lists of relevant words (passion, transformation, intimacy) and ‘seeing’ devices (zoetrope, stereoscope, camera obscura), and photographs of Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard and the Maysles brothers. ‘It’s like walking into the book,’ Spiotta told me. ‘You feel it all around you.’” To prepare for her upcoming release, revisit our review of Stone Arabia.