Though excellent fiction has been staged in restaurants (Richard Russo’s Empire Falls comes to mind, as well as YA novel Hope was Here), I have to admit Rebecca Makkai at Ploughshares has a point that dining-in-public scenes are getting a bit old. “All the unfolding of napkins and poking at the French fries… it’s filler.”
Get out of the restaurant
Gossip Girl Violence
Apparently the idea that vampires and zombies aren’t real but serial killers are didn’t occur to anyone associated with the book, Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer.
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Salton Sea as Holy Land
“Every journal is a confessional. If it’s in the first person, it cannot help but be. Unless the author of it lies to himself—and that makes it even more of a confessional. For some reason, travel brings out confessions one would never make at home. I am trying to draw the rake of my journal over the landscape. Perhaps I will uncover something.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s new collection of travel journals, Writing Across the Landscape, is out now. Travel on back to The Millions for Kate McCahill’s essay on traveling with books.
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Ta-Nahisi Coates’ bibliography
Earlier this month, Ta-Nahisi Coates published a conversation-changing long form article on race and reparations in The Atlantic (we covered other pundits’ responses here). Now, he is blogging a brief bibliography of the sources he consulted while writing that seminal essay. Parts one and two are available now, with two more installments planned for today and tomorrow. Whether or not you agree with Coates, it’s a fantastic reading list on race relations in America.
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Steve Jobs
60 Minutes aired a great overview of Walter Isaacson‘s bestselling (yet just released today) Steve Jobs biography. The book was also reviewed by Janet Maslin for The New York Times.
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Maud Newton Talks to Philip Connors
Today at The Paris Review blog, Maud Newton talks to Philip Connors, author of Millions most-anticipated book Fire Season.
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