Recommended Reading: Colson Whitehead on Family Life by Akhil Sharma.
“The right investment of his time”
“Most of my hike was saying, this is a black body, and it belongs everywhere.”
“There is no divorcing the lack of diversity in the outdoors from a history of violence against the black body, systemic racism, and income inequality,” writes Rahawa Haile in her description of hiking the full length of the Appalachian Trail. Along the way, Haile documented her journey and the books she carried — books written by black authors. In a debrief interview, she explains her motivation: “I want[ed] to bring these books places no one likely has. I want[ed] to document where black brilliance belongs.”
●
●
Penkov Takes the BBC ISS Award
East of the West author Miroslav Penkov is sitting pretty these days. The Bulgarian fiction writer recently nabbed the BBC International Short Story Award for his collection’s titular story, “East of the West.” With a purse of £15,000, this is the world’s biggest prize for short stories, though typically it considers work by British authors only. However this year, due to the 2012 Olympics, the field was expanded to include international writers. All five judges unanimously picked Penkov’s work over the nine other submissions. You can read an excerpt online courtesy of Google Books, and you can get a little more acquainted with Penkov’s themes on Picador’s Tumblr.
●
●
Which is Which
“Two writers guard an archive. One writes Fiction; the other writes Fact. To get past them, you have to figure out which is which.” Recommended reading: The New Yoker‘s Jill Lepore attempts to trace the “long-lost story of the longest book ever written,” Joe Gould‘s The Oral History of Our Time.
●
●
Type In Your Own Handwriting
Galley Cat links to an online program that allows you to turn your handwriting into a computer font – so you can literally type in your own handwriting.
●
●
Marty the Monster
True Detective ended weeks ago, but someone once told me, “Time is a flat circle,” and that everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again. And this piece on the show’s finale by Lili Loofbourow is going to be the best one you’ll read on the internet again and again and again forever. (Bonus: Our own Ujala Sehgal crafted a reading list based on one of the show’s [missing] elements.)
●
●
Feels so good being bad
For the last couple days #badwritingtips, a collection of hilarious writing tips to take your novel from typical to terrible, have been trending on twitter. The Guardian rounded up a few of their favorites. Perhaps this advice will help out the unlucky souls retweeted on working on my novel.
●
●
Abramson Taking Over at the Times
Big media news today: “Jill Abramson, a former investigative reporter and Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, will become the paper’s executive editor, succeeding Bill Keller, who is stepping down to become a full-time writer for the paper.”
●
●