“Be patient – even with chaos.” Advice for the upcoming writer from Lydia Davis.
Lydia’s Advice
Kaitlyn Greenidge on Seeing Past the Dominant History
Kaitlyn Greenidge discusses her new novel, Libertie, and how she sought to tell stories from communities not commonly heard from in history books.
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“To do so, I felt, would be too dangerous”
Over at Electric Literature, Tara Isabella Burton likens the experience of reading her ex’s favorite book – in this case Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity – to “rifling through someone’s letters after a death.”
Read Russia 2012
Read Russia 2012 aims to celebrate contemporary Russian literature and book culture, and they’ve scheduled a bunch of events in the NYC area to coincide with next week’s BEA. You should certainly check them out, as well as NYRB Classics’ ongoing coverage of their own Russian literature highlights. (You can get even more information over here, too.)
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A Zombie Meets a Snake
Recommended Reading: Over at Harper’s, Anne Carson describes what happens when a zombie meets a snake, in her first published short story.
Adventures in Publishing
At My Life and Thoughts, Elif Batuman–in delightfully Elifish style–describes her first book travails and unveils a preliminary sketch for the cover of her forthcoming first book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, drawn by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast.
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May the odds be ever in your favor, Suzanne Collins.
The Hunger Games raked in $155 million in its opening weekend. That makes it the highest-grossing non-sequel debut of all time. Over at Salon, Laura Miller tracks the steps that led to the blockbuster’s mammoth success.
From Abkhazia to Zimbabwe
“[W]e can confirm that there is no place on Earth (not even Antarctica) that literature isn’t written.” Michael Barron, the U.S. literary editor for Culture Trip, curates “The Global Anthology,” an online project showcasing more than 220 pieces of literature from all over the world written in or translated into English (via Moby Lives).
The Kite and the String
“Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill.” The Atlantic has an excellent contribution to the age-old thesis that creativity and madness are inextricably linked–and tied, moreover, to mental illness–based in part on a sample of students at Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Pair with another essay on creativity and the “touch of madness” from our own archives.
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