“Maybe this is a writer thing, having pages and pages of stuff written that has not yet cohered into a completed arc, which, when you finish it, would be a laurel on which you could rest.” A writer considers Chekhov’s dictum.
The gun goes off in the end
Welcome Bill
The Millions is adding a new staff writer today. Join us in welcoming Bill Morris. Bill most recently wrote a consideration of China Miéville for the site this week, his fifth piece for us thus far. Bill is the author of the novels Motor City and All Souls’ Day. His writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, L.A. Weekly, the (London) Independent, the Washington Post Magazine and the website Aolnews.com. He lives in New York City.
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A Book A Day Keeps Depression Away
“Doctors in England will soon be prescribing books as well as pills to patients suffering from anxiety and depression,” writes Harvey Morris. Hopefully none of these bummers make the cut.
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Football Book Club: Bye Week
It’s bye week over at Football Book Club. And while there’s no new book to read this week — everybody’s resting up, licking their wounds, and sticking pins in Jay Cutler voodoo dolls — you, gentle reader, should be sure to check in for new posts on Louisa Hall’s Speak — and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.
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Your Thoughts on Painters?
“Writers are not often great lovers but pathological inventors of explanations. Sex induces a kind of cowardice in them, a fear of experimentation, of being vulnerable, of stepping naked onto the stage to examine all the presumptions that pass without question when everyone still has their pants on.” Michael Thomsen makes the case that dating writers is a bad idea.
Poets on Poets
Editing poetry can be tricky, and the work is often misunderstood. Many of the best houses leave the work to the experts: actual poets. But is that the best route? Indeed, as this Telegraph article puts it, “a house’s tone and fortunes can be radically altered depending on the poet in charge of the poems of others.”
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Idolizing Hemingway
Robert Roper wonders whether or not Ernest Hemingway‘s death has “eclipsed his work.” Elsewhere, Melville House wonders whether or not the FBI had something to do with it. The author’s influence is as apparent today as ever before, though perhaps it’s not his death that endures, but rather his perceived masculine mystique.
Hope in the Dark
“Most of all, they don’t tell you that fear, to reverse a phrase from C. S. Lewis, will feel so like grief, and so you begin to mourn what you have not yet lost, because mourning prematurely is the only way to protect yourself from hope.” For Catapult, Laura Turner writes about her trio of miscarriages and the hope she lost (and found) along the way. (Turner is a 2017 Year in Reading alum).