“You could say that Fancy is about a couple of comical old kooks stuck in a dismal town finding creative ways of making themselves (and some luckless bystanders) crazy … and you wouldn’t be wrong. But you could also say that it’s the story of the composition of the manifesto of a bizarre and protean (protozoan?) order of being in which we’re all just patterns mistaking ourselves for people.” In a piece for BOMB Magazine, Scott Esposito interviews Jeremy M. Davies about Bernhard, Olive Garden, writing Fancy and reintroducing humor into modernist literature. Their conversation pairs well with our own Nick Ripatrazone‘s look at, well, the conversations of BOMB interviews.
Bernhard and Olive Garden
More Marginalia
Sam Anderson’s brilliant Year in Marginalia inspires MobyLives to announce the “Melville House Marginalia Contest.”
Melatonin, Menthol Lights, Jungle Gyms
At Trickhouse‘s Back Room, Ian Ganassi lists life’s essentials, along with a few I could do without.
Literary Playlists (Again)
A. A. Knopf and Doubleday publishers have gathered Spotify playlists by such notables as Colson Whitehead, Jennifer Egan, Erin Morgenstern, and a selection of songs and artists mentioned in Haruki Murakami‘s 1Q84.
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The Gifts of Workshop
A translation guide to writing workshops that we’re definitely printing out and bringing along to our next one. “Sometimes when people say ‘show, don’t tell,’ what they mean is that they find the characters sympathetic, the story is moving forward, and they even like the conflict, but they just don’t like the way you wrote it. What they’d really like to do is steal the idea and write it themselves, because honestly, they would do a much better job.”
Charm City, Murdaland
In a piece for Aeon, D. Watkins – who previously blew onto the scene with his Salon essay, “Too Poor for Pop Culture” – looks into “the two Baltimores” he has known. Tracing the city’s history back to the Civil War, he defines the city as “a place split on ideologies because it’s too south to be north and too north to be south.”
Kriegman Explains It All
This Splitsider interview with Clarissa Explains It All creator Mitchell Kriegman is fantastic. Among the many revelations that come out of the interview is this gem: “The most amazing person that you would never guess worked on the show was [The Hunger Games author] Suzanne Collins. She was the quietest, nicest person. Like having JK Rowling working on your show!”
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The Secret Space of Diaries
For the New Yorker, Morgan Jerkins reviews Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours and considers what keeping a diary means for “a black woman in a white world.”