By the age of twenty-one, Eugene O’Neill had dropped out of Princeton, fathered a child and caught syphilis on a trip through South America. He was, in his own words, “the Irish luck kid,” blessed in a strange way with misfortune. Yet he went on to win a Pulitzer eleven years later. How did he do it? In the LRB, John Lahr reads a new biography of the playwright.
The Bad Luck Club
A History of Pen Names
This week in book-related infographics: “A History of Pen Names,” from Robinson Crusoe to Dr. Seuss to Toni Morrison.
“The real subject of his book is scale”
Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to take Kathryn Schulz’s book recommendations. However when she refers to something – in this case J.M. Ledgard’s Submergence – as “the best novel I’ve read so far this year,” you really ought to listen up. By the time she invokes Philip Gourevitch, Anne Carson, W. G. Sebald, and John Le Carré in her review of that book, you ought to be reaching for your wallet.
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Taste Lessons for Adults
How do you eat your broccoli? British food historian Bee Wilson’s newest book, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat takes a hard look at how eating is a learned, cultural behavior–and how it’s never too late to change bad eating habits.
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D.H. Lawrence at 21
“If you would write, try to be terse and in some measure original—the world abounds with new similes and metaphors… If you cannot tell people of something they have not seen, or have not thought, it is hardly worthwhile to write at all.” The Paris Review shares writing advice from a 21-year-old D.H. Lawrence .
Saving Hughes’s House
Last-minute signal boost! You have a few more hours to donate to I, Too, Arts Collective‘s campaign to convert Langston Hughes‘s former home into a non-profit cultural center. See also: our own Emily Wilkinson’s review of his Tambourines to Glory.
The Winning Team
Graywolf Press – the publisher behind Citizen, The Empathy Exams, The Argonauts, and On Immunity: An Inoculation – has built a reputation as “a scrappy little press that harnessed and to some extent generated a revolution in nonfiction, turning the previously unprepossessing genre of the ‘lyric essay’ into a major cultural force.” Over at Vulture, Boris Kachka writes about the history of one of the nation’s leading independent literary publishers.
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