Recommended reading: Adele Waldman defends the purpose and form of the novel and balances David Shield‘s Reality Hunger against Anna Karenina.
Defense Against Detractors
Philip Roth Disses Fiction
Philip Roth, one of America's most distiguished and prolific novelists, tells the Financial Times that he no longer reads fiction. Why not? "I don't know," he says. "I wised up."
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Delicate Husk, Inconvenient Hair
Recommended Reading: "So Often the Body Becomes a Distraction" by Kaveh Akbar.
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Trading Camp Fires for Factions
First there was The Hunger Games summer camp, and now there will be a Divergent theme camp in Naperville, Illinois. Camp Divergent will feature activities based on the five factions, such as brain teasers on Erudite day and planting vegetables on Amity day. Don't worry; no one will be ziplining off of a skyscraper for Dauntless.
This is the title for an object that arouses interest, as by being novel or extraordinary.
From HTML GIANT's ongoing Oulipo craft notes series comes a technique so simple that anyone can do it. All you need is a dictionary.
Hits and Misses
"You’d be hard-pressed to find a book that was at once so bold in style and ambitious in structure and so much fun to read." The Guardian asks indie publishers about the books that made their year, including Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue (whose own Year in Reading you can find here).
Need Not Apply
"It may be vanity on my part ... but I have a fairly high opinion of the two pieces that I sent in." A 68-year-old aspiring writer has accused the Iowa Writers' Workshop of age discrimination, reports The Los Angeles Times. In his complaint, Dan Thomson cites "statistics from the program that reveal that, in the last five years, just over 100 would-be graduate students over the age of 50 applied to the program, but none made the cut." Doesn't he know you don't need an MFA, anyway?
All Told
You might have heard that a new Shirley Jackson book appeared on shelves this week. A collection of previously unpublished work, Let Me Tell You was published by Penguin Random House, which happens to be the place where Benjamin Dreyer, a lifelong Shirley Jackson fan, works as a copy chief and managing editor. At The Toast, he describes how it felt to edit his favorite writer.
Staff Writer Sonya Chung at Tin House
At the Tin House blog, I write about my literary education in independent bookstores Also, my piece about James Salter appears in Tin House's current issue.