A Pittsburgh-based nonprofit is offering free housing and stipends to “foreign-born scribes who endured imprisonment, or worse, in their home countries.”
City of Asylum
Dispatch from the Phillipines
Over at The New York Times Magazine, Katrina Tan finds a creative community in Manila. Pair with this Millions essay on creating a DIY literary scene.
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“I did most of my reading at the International House of Pancakes.”
David Sedaris chats with The New York Times about his reading habits in the first installment of their latest series, “By the Book.”
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Benefits Does Have a Nicer Ring to It
In its treatment of the poor, Britain may be “going back to the Middle Ages,” says Booker repeat winner Hilary Mantel. Indeed, she explains, “In some respects … Cromwell lived in a more enlightened time.” And she’s not the only high profile UK author to come to the side of government welfare these days. In a two–part interview for The Daily Show, J.K. Rowling notes that she couldn’t have written her first books without government “benefits.”
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Dalí’s Secret Word
Salvador Dalí appeared on an episode of the 1950s-1960s-era game show “What’s My Line?”. (via)
“I don’t believe the reader needs to know anything about me.”
Ben Lerner has a story [subscription required] in this week’s New Yorker that, like his debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station, features a protagonist named The Author. The magazine interviewed Lerner about the invitation to blur his fiction with his autobiography. He says that his work in an exercise in “activating those questions in peculiar ways—but the questions, not the answers, are what strike me as interesting.”
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David Foster Wallace In Brief
“Wallace’s fiction contains enormous cruelty… But it is also a deeply moral body of work. Its difficulties, and many of its cruelties, exist for specific reasons. Whether Wallace’s fraught projects are successes or failures is up to the individual, but these are judgments that all serious readers should want to make for themselves.” Chris Power considers David Foster Wallace‘s short stories in an essay for The Guardian and argues that after Infinite Jest they just might be the most important work he produced.
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