Recommended Reading: Drew Nelles on Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.
End Games
The Good Fight
Sometimes — like now, say — an artist has to ask what it means to continue working. At The Rumpus, Lara Downes explores her resolve to keep playing and teaching music, and writes about what she’s done while teaching in Louisville this week.
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Non Fiction Takes a Certain Vulnerability
We’ve recommended reading up on Jenny Zhang‘s Sour Heart before, this interview in Hazlitt is one of our favorites. “And maybe this is crude to talk about, it’s not even that I don’t want to write a memoir. Beyond that, do you understand how vulnerable it makes someone to call something nonfiction? Not just emotionally vulnerable but financially vulnerable, do you realize someone that makes $40,000 a year cannot be hit by a lawsuit by some angry ex who objected about a chapter about him? Some guy sees one line about him, missing thousands of lines not about him. That’s why celebrities are the ones who write memoirs.”
A Review in Comics
Book reviews are great and all, but even we sometimes feel they’re missing something. Enter Kevin Thomas, whose HORN! illustrated reviews for The Rumpus are beautiful and informative in under 9 panels. Compare his pieces on Roxane Gay‘s An Untamed State or Leslie Jamison‘s The Empathy Exams to our reviews here and here, and be sure to check out the just-published HORN! The Collected Reviews.
Old-Fashioned
“And now, as an adult, I love nothing more than curling up with a good book, closing my eyes, breathing in through my nostrils, keeping my eyes closed and not reading yet continuing to draw in oxygen for hours, and, thanks to my fetishized olfactory associations for printed and bound matter, becoming sexually aroused.” On the scent that no e-reader can ever replace.
Odd Jobs
Recommended viewing: The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik talks about his early years in New York writing for the magazine “though they simply weren’t aware of it, or when they were aware of it they were extremely unenthusiastic,” and about all the odd jobs that often make up a writer’s early career, something our own Emily St. James Mandel has written about before.
Why Iceland? Is It the Cod?
VQR contributor Bill Hayes explains his reasons for visiting Iceland as often as he does, and, surprisingly, does not count VQR’s great piece about Iceland’s fisheries among them.