Recommended Reading: Lindsay Whalen’s interview with Lev Grossman, which goes nicely with our review of The Magicians.
“My life when I was that age was such a disaster”
When He Was Good
The 80th birthday of Philip Roth inspires a festschrift of sorts over at New York Magazine, with Sam Lipsyte, Kathryn Schulz, James Franco (natch), and others weighing in on Roth’s Best Book and other vexed questions. (For the record, it’s Sabbath’s Theater.)
Kali Fajardo-Anstine on Representing Different Realities
Kali Fajardo-Anstine and Mieko Kawakami interviewed each other with the help of translators, discussing their books Sabrina & Corina and Breast and Eggs.
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Viet Thanh Nguyen and the Refugee’s Narrative
Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses the complexity behind refugee narratives and resisting the temptation of shallow representation.
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True Story
Over at Granta, Melissa Febos writes about truth. As she puts it, “The true telling of our stories often requires the annihilation of other stories, the ones we build and carry through our lives because it is easier to preserve some mysteries.”
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David Foster Wallace’s Last Interview
Coming soon from Melville House’s “The Last Interview” series: the last interviews with David Foster Wallace and Jorge Luis Borges.
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Writing From the Other Wordsworth
The Oxford University Press blog has a never-before-published poem by Dorothy Wordsworth. She constructed the piece in 1839 while suffering from arteriosclerosis and dementia because “there was a therapeutic dimension both in creating and ‘performing’ poetry,” writes Lucy Newlyn.
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“We are pouring a lot of money down the drain”
A lucid piece in The Boston Globe explains how “academic publishing is not a free market.”