The Skinny is acclaimed author Susan Orlean’s strangest work, hands down: a half-serious diet book that advises women, among other things, to cover tempting food with bleach. Not one to follow her own advice, Orlean’s diary of a week of eating for Grub Street features yogurt breakfasts, crackers eaten over sinks, and other basically realistic, bleach-free culinary adventures.
The real Susan Orlean diet
A Response to the Death of Writing
“Why, after all, do writers write? What is the impulse, the insistence on story, on seeing and representing the world? It has little to do with technology although everything to do with narrative, which is a purpose that, on the surface, technology also seems to share. The difference is that the writer creates narrative with intention, whereas technology merely gathers, or processes, information, leaving interpretation, analysis, up to us.” Let’s just say David L. Ulin doesn’t think Joyce would work for Google.
Remarks on Color
Recommended Reading: On Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. “They have many things in common, but where they connect most strikingly is in their shared suspicion of theory and their emphasis on the visual.”
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Flying Aces
What happens when two magazine writers publish stories on the same topic within a month of each other? We get to read some of the best long-form journalism of the year. Both Esquire’s Chris Jones and The Washingtonian’s Garrett M. Graff wrote about what it was like to be on Air Force One after the Kennedy assassination. Jones’ “The Flight From Dallas” hits 7,600 words, but Graff’s “Angel is Airborne” totals 18,000. Save some time to read both because they’re equally gripping and uniquely told narratives.
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Hitchens on Cancer
Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair on his cancer diagnosis: “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”
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Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies Coming in May
Big news for fans of Hilary Mantel and her Booker-winning (and Millions Hall of Famer) Wolf Hall. The U.S. release date for the much anticipated Wolf Hall sequel Bring Up the Bodies has been moved up from the fall to May 22nd to coincide with the U.K. release date.
Marketing Murakami
To encourage first edition sales of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, his publishers are going to include “a special sheet of stickers designed by five Japanese illustrators.” If that sounds as corny to you as it does to me, then consider the fact that the book likely does not need any real marketing strategy whatsoever: when it came out in Japan, it sold over a million copies per week.
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