You may know that The Butter founder Roxane Gay had a banner year in 2014. The Year in Reading alum published a collection of essays and her debut novel. At Salon, she talks with Sara Scribner, sharing her thoughts on modern feminism, Lena Dunham and her plans for her next book.
Where We Are
Basta
It’s rare that a writer decides his new novel will be his last, but that’s exactly what Michael Faber has done with regards to his latest, which comes out this week. In the Times, he talks with Alexandra Alter about his decision, saying: “I felt that I had one more book in me that could be special and sincere and extraordinary, and that that would be enough.” It’s probably a good time to read our own Bill Morris on the history of literary retirements.
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Shiny Unhappy People
Julia Fierro discusses her new book Cutting Teeth and the anxiety of privileged Americans in the digital age with Tin House. "They should be happy, but they aren’t, and they are aware that they are not and that they should be, and this awareness makes them loathe themselves."
Poet and Magician
One of the titans of Modernist poetry, Hilda Doolittle, or H.D. to her friends, was psychoanalyzed in the 1930s by none other than Sigmund Freud. Her letters to her friends describe the account in great detail, despite explicit instructions from Freud not to speak about their time together with anyone. This essay from The Millions on video games and Freud is a nice complementary piece.
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City of Asylum
A Pittsburgh-based nonprofit is offering free housing and stipends to “foreign-born scribes who endured imprisonment, or worse, in their home countries.”
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Writing the Suburban Wild
In a longform piece for The Atlantic Diane Saverin writes about Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the predominantly male tradition of wilderness-writing, and how Dillard found and wrote about the wild while living in suburbia. She also wrestles with the question: "if the author conveys a resonant truth, does it matter what experiences led to the realizations?"
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You Are Not the Reader
Whether it’s the new compound word “babymommas,” the Mortal Kombat reference, or the phrase “skeedaddle face smash,” I feel compelled to recommend to you this story in PANK, which takes the form of several letters addressed to Maury Povich.
“Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!”
Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil. And earlier: Bishop, translation, and the transmutation of loss.
I gave my wife Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist for Christmas because she has been on a feminist lit tear lately, eating up De Beauvoir, Firestone, Freidan and Dworkin. She was fifty pages into it when she finally asked me, “How come you got me this shitty memoir?”