“Writing isn’t entirely mental. You’re a physical being, and sometimes when your writing is broken, it’s your body that needs attention, not your mind.” Rebecca Makkai has some tips for breaking writer’s block and a very cool perspective on writing as a whole person. Pair with our interview with Makkai about her latest novel, The Hundred-Year House.
“Writing isn’t entirely mental.”
Sunday Reading
Booksellers from NYC's famous indie bookstore McNally Jackson share 5 book recommendations with Harper's Bazaar. Elsewhere, The Daily Beast has collected the best long reads of the past week.
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Personals, for the Bookish
All the Sad Young Literary Women
Are New York Times book reviewers biased toward writers who are “white and male and live in Brooklyn”? Chris Jackson at The Atlantic laments all the sad young literary women.
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The 2017 Rooster
There's a new Tournament of Books winner in town, and it's also being adapted for the screen by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, so it truly does rain when it pours.
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“I hate literature”
Recommended reading: The Guardian reports on Varlam Shalamov, a Russian author who spent 17 years in the harsh camps of the Kolyma gulag, wrote more than 140 short stories, and still claimed "“I hate literature. I do not write memoirs; nor do I write short stories. That is, I try to write not a short story but something that would not be literature.”
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Infinite Stupidity
Why innovate when you can just Google and copy? Mark Pagel on the perils of "being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet."