Recommended listening: David Naimon interviews Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star, about “anorexia and astronomy, stars and bodies.” Pair with Alex Norcia‘s Millions review of Gerard’s novel here.
Stars and Bodies
Thoughts of the Enemy
In the new Granta, Adam Johnson writes about the mind-bending experience of traveling to North Korea, an experience which informed his Pulitzer-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son. Perhaps the saddest anecdote -- and there are a lot of sad anecdotes -- is the one about the North Korean tour guide who couldn’t believe the author didn’t want to buy knockoff goods.
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From Isolation to Affluence
“It’s likely Lucia would have felt more comfortable watching a bull be gored in a Mexico City arena or huddling among winos on a corner in Oakland than she ever felt at her first place on posh Mapleton Hill.” Elizabeth Geoghegan for The Paris Review on Lucia Berlin, whose A Manual For Cleaning Women is out now.
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On Remembering and Forgetting
“We have all heard the claim, ‘the victors write the textbooks.’ Among the many ways to unpack the phrase is this: that once upon a time history was bound to and relied on communally agreed upon facts. That is to say, there was not a culture of record the way there is now. There were not cameras and photographs capturing all human movement or digital archives where information was stored in 'clouds.' While our methods for remembering have evolved, the ethical question at the heart of recollection remains: how do we tell about the past and who gets to tell it?” Lindsey Drager writes for the Michigan Quarterly Review about memory and storytelling.
Russian Lit Quiz
Pop quiz for all you fans of Russian literature: What's the protagonist's first name in Doctor Zhivago? Hint: It isn't "Doctor."
To Believe Your Own Thought
Recommended Reading: Sophie Atkinson on Frank Ocean as Emersonian hero.
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