Recommended reading: Year in Reading alum Leslie Jamison writes about the pleasures and “democratic awe” of Whitman‘s Specimen Days. Pair with our own Michael Bourne‘s “Embracing the Other I Am: or, How Walt Whitman Saved My Life.”
Abundance and Awe
People were not invited–they went there.
The mansion that inspired The Great Gatsby's West Egg has been privately sold, after sitting on the market for two years.
Ask Her About Her Uterus
"Too often, a woman’s pain is not merely met with doubt, but suspicion, both within the medical community and outside of it." The New Republic writes about female pain, the medical community, and Abby Norman's book, Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain.
The Empathy Exams
"[G]uess what, spending hours of your spare time plowing through some dense and symbol-laden carnival of affectation and ambiguity only makes you resentful of the publishing industry that pushed the book on you in the first place." Alex Balk at The Awl takes the piss out of recent studies that have suggested reading literary fiction might make us better people. Writer John Vaillant, whom we interviewed last year, might disagree.
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How The Room Was Made
Readers of Millions Originals ebook Epic Fail are deeply familiar with Tommy Wiseau’s heroically bad 2003 film, The Room. So, too, are people masochistic enough to sit through the actual movie. Together, they might be wondering how such a production came to be – and how it came to fail so horribly. Well, finally a new book co-authored by Greg Sestaro and Tom Bissell seeks to answer that question. You can check out an excerpt over here.
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