Longtime writers know how hard it can be to tell when a piece is finished. Tolstoy famously tried to revise War and Peace right up to the book’s publication. At the Ploughshares blog, Amy Jo Burns offers tips for evaluating a piece before deciding to give it to someone else.
Done Deals
A Convergence of Cowboys
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sean McCoy reports on the 35th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering and tells you everything you didn't know about the history and aesthetics of cowboy poetry.
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Hawthorne and Melville
“Melville fell in love with the dashingly handsome older author the first time they met, and his forbidden passion drove him to create the symbol of impossible longing that now represents American literature to the rest of the world: the white whale.” On Herman Melville’s love for Nathaniel Hawthorne. Pair with a review of Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun.
So What? He Says
Following the Irish release of The Guts, the new Roddy Doyle novel that brings back Jimmy Rabbitte from The Commitments, The Irish Times interviews Doyle, who remembers a time when his writing garnered him death threats. Sample quote: “I drove the guy in the next room demented as I replayed an old tape, repeating the same musical phrase, again and again.”
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“As a goal in life, you could do worse than ‘try to be kinder.'”
The Above Average team animated an adaptation of George Saunders’s Syracuse University commencement speech, “The Importance of Kindness.” (You can read the original over here.) The speech has since been expanded, and it was published this past week.
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Polygamy the New Feminism?
Fans intrigued/disturbed by the real-life look at polygamy from the perspective of women in the HBO series “Big Love” might be interested in this bit of news from Siberia.
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