I’ve written before about the First Sentence series at Granta. The magazine asks a prominent writer to explain how they came to write an opening line. Recently, they asked Bear Down, Bear North author Melinda Moustakis to talk about the beginning of her story “River So Close”: “She’s a good-for-nothing chummer.” You could also read Jonathan Russell Clark on the art of the opening sentence.
Chummers
A Quintet of Interviews for Your Delectation
Anya Ulinich, author of Petropolis, talks to World Literature Today: “What else can a person do when she gets home after a ten-hour work day – with a toothache that she can’t afford to fix . . . – but fall on the couch and watch whatever is in front of her face?” . . . Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories is just out, talks to Sarah Manguso for The Believer: “At the origin of the work there has to be strong feeling, if it’s going to be any good. Of course, that strong feeling can be a delight in language.” . . . The Book Bench unearths a 1978 John Updike interview with a Croation periodical, which finds the Rabbit Angstrom author halfway through his tetralogy. . . . Edwin Frank of NYRB Classics talks to Omnivoracious, and selects his favorite books in the series (via). . . . And James Ellroy submits to interrogation at The Paris Review: “I was always thinking about how I would become a great novelist.”
Talking Seveneves
Recommended listening: David Naimon talks with Neal Stephenson about his new novel, Seveneves. Pair with Chris Barsanti‘s Millions review.
Roxane Gay on How Audre Lorde Honored the Lived Realities of Women
Roxane Gay pays tribute to Audre Lorde's contribution to contemporary feminism and her ability to value differences as strengths.
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The Feel of Municipal Politics
Recommended Reading: Parul Sehgal on Jonathan Franzen’s first novel. (You could also check out Eric Lundgren’s counterpoint.)
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Unfamiliar Discourse
Recommended Reading: Je Banach on what literary discourse offers in an age of extremism. For Banach, literary discourse is “the language of our future because it is the language of confronting that which is foreign to us.”
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Emazing
Fans of the French Oulipo movement will know about A Void, the Georges Perec novel written entirely without the use of the letter “e.” What very few readers of any kind know, however, is that in 1939, thirty years before Perec’s novel was published, Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a book in English, Gadsby, that hewed to these same constraints. At The Atlantic, Nikhil Sonnad investigates how this experiment plays out in the book.
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Burrito Lit Vol. 2
Attention literature-lovers and burrito-consumers: Chipotle has announced the second batch of writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan, and Neil Gaiman, for its Cultivating Thought series, which places short pieces of writing on soda cups and paper bags (we covered the first series here).
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“Her prints certainly have muscle, and a lot of it.”
Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, a collection of one-panel comic prints made by Flannery O’Connor during her time in college, is due out later this week. Meanwhile, Barry Moser exhibits a few of the highlights.
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It took me a while to settle on one, but I eventually found the perfect opening sentence for my book, “Letter to a Prohibitionist”: “First of all, I want to thank you for getting back to me.”