There’s an excerpt from Darcey Steinke’s forthcoming novel, Sister Golden Hair, over at Granta right now. In our Great Book Preview, Emily St. John Mandel wrote that Steinke’s novel focuses on a family “on the brink of collapse” in early-70’s Virginia.
Sister Golden Hair Excerpt
Miles to Go before I Sleep
Our own Nick Ripatrazone writes for The Atlantic about the tradition of writers who love to run, from Haruki Murakami to Joyce Carol Oates. Pair with Ripatrazone’s Millions essay on writing as training.
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DJ Poet Laureate
California poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera dropped in on NPR as guest DJ last week, and you can listen to the full thirty-minute radio show, as well as five of the tracks he played.
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Bullish on Bookstagram
“It’s hard to say what truly moves the needle. Bookstagrammers help in that they get images of your book cover out there (and they make them look so pretty!), and readers need to see a book a couple of times, in a couple of different places, before they are inclined to buy it.” Author Brenda Janowitz in Forbes about the surprising success of Instagram as a book marketing platform. See also Davey Davis from our own pages on the Insta-pornification of food.
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Fact-checking Steinbeck
As John Steinbeck’s classic Travels With Charley nears the half-century mark, a writer has retraced the author’s cross-country journey and come to the conclusion that the resulting book was full of inaccuracies and outright fabrications. The journalist Bill Steigerwald, whose article appears in the current issue of the libertarian quarterly Reason, says he didn’t set out to trash the Nobel laureate. “As a libertarian, I kind of liked the old guy,” Steigerwald tells the New York Times. “He liked guns; he liked property rights.”
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Bachmann’s Books
Michele Bachmann will participate in a live chat with Newsweek today, and will perhaps speak about the issue’s controversial cover. To prepare, NPR looks into which books and beliefs have shaped the presidential candidate’s views.
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The Afterlife of David Foster Wallace
“Wallace’s status has rapidly evolved from marginal writer, noted for long, experimental work, to indispensable reference point for people writing about almost anything—from college football to WikiLeaks.” On the powerful afterlife of David Foster Wallace.
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Writers and Their Day Jobs
Writing for Full Stop, Robert Fay asks, “If Mr. [T.S.] Eliot had to have a day job, why is it that writers and poets today are so cagey about what they do to pay the bills?” Previously, two of our staff writers have explored similar aspects of the same question. In 2009, Emily St. John Mandel wrote of the “constant struggle” that arises from “striking a balance between writing literary fiction and paying the rent.” And last year, Edan Lepucki looked at the perils of including “non-writing jobs” in one’s author bio.
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