“Raymond Chandler did not invent the private eye — Dashiell Hammett and a few others got there first. But his vision is the one that caught the public eye and stuck most indelibly in the imagination, like — in one of his aromatic metaphors — ‘a tarantula on a slice of angel food.’” On a new biography of the man behind Phillip Marlowe.
Like a Nun in a Motorcar
The working mother’s guide to writing a novel
Over at the Los Angeles Times, novelist and critic Mary McNamara offers a working mother's guide to writing a novel. A glimpse into the life of someone who's way better at managing her time than I am.
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“Platonic Word”
Recommended reading: Edward Mendelson reflects on "how bizarrely Platonic [Microsoft] Word can be" and on writing in WordPerfect, where "the world seems more open, a place where endings can’t be predicted, where freedom might be real."
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Sendak’s Tales
Check out Maurice Sendak's illustrations of The Brothers Grimm fairy tales posted on Brain Pickings this April. The illustrations were published with Lore Segal’s translation of the stories in The Juniper Tree: And Other Tales from Grimm. Our own Emily Colette Wilkinson revisits Sendak’s stories as an adult.
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“Tongue-in-Cheek Tocqueville”
"'So your idea is to drive across America and write about it without talking to a single American?' 'Yes.'" Karl Ove Knausgaard travels North America as “a tongue-in-cheek Tocqueville” for the New York Times Magazine. Pair with his piece for The Millions, "The View from My Window is a Constant Reminder," and with Jonathan Callahan's reading of Knausgaard's My Struggle.
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Speculations
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