50 years and 1 day ago Jean-Paul Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yesterday Steve Neumann wrote for The Airship about what writers can learn from Sartre’s refusal.
Sartre and the Nobel Prize
Woody Allen’s Favorite Books
The ever-irreverent Woody Allen weighs in on his all-time faves, among other things. A Catcher in the Rye unsurprisingly makes the list, as do more obscure picks like The World of SJ Perelman.
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Press Start
Readers of the 1960s and 70s ran into many people who worried that writers were learning from television. In 2015, the concern is slightly different — are writers taking cues from video games? At the Ploughshares blog, Matthew Burnside tackles the game-ification of books.
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Once Upon A Time
Ignore films like Memento when writing, Steve Almond argues, and instead focus on old-fashioned devices like narrative, plot, and character development.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Baldwin; Lacey; Lim; Berman; Umrigar; Fierro
Out this week: The Last Kid Left by Rosecrans Baldwin; The Answers by Catherine Lacey; Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim; Perennials by Mandy Berman; Everybody’s Son by Thrity Umrigar; and The Gypsy Moth Summer by Julia Fierro. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Everyone Is a Writer
“People in the publishing industry were complaining that ‘everyone is a writer now.’ I thought, well, why fight that? Isn’t that a good thing?” Andy Hunter, Publisher & COO of Catapult, Publisher of Literary Hub, and Co-Founding Chairman of Electric Literature, talks about the impetus for his three ventures.
Should’ve Read The Lease
“On the day I moved in, without giving it any thought, we started to refer to one storage space—there are three, two low-ceilinged ones on either side of the pitch-roofed room and one closet—as ‘the bad area.’ We had barely walked in, we (at least I) had forgotten the ghost, and here we were—‘the bad area.’” Amie Barrodale writes at The Paris Review Daily about life in a haunted apartment.
Through a Bell Darkly
As you may have heard, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of Sylvia Plath. It also, not coincidentally, marks the release of two new biographies: American Isis (the first to draw material from the recently-opened Ted Hughes archive) and Mad Girl’s Love Song (which looks at the poet’s relationship with her “big, dark, hunky boy”). Emma Garman weighs the impact of all this new scholarship at Salon.
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