Recommended reading: Philip Connors, whose memoir All the Wrong Places was included in our 2015 Book Preview, writes for the New Yorker about his brother’s death and the problems with “cathartic” writing.
Writing About Suicide
Google Poetry Translation
Google is adapting its translation technology to accomodate the nuances of poetry. Guardian asks, how will it handle “The Jabberwocky”?
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The Interpretation of Dreams
“Why, for instance, did I dream I had surged up through the lawn of Toronto’s Victoria College and clomped into the library, decomposing and covered with mud? The librarian didn’t notice a thing, which, in the dream, I found surprising. Was this an anxiety dream? If so, which anxiety?” Margaret Atwood’s dream diary.
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Review of Per Petterson’s “I Curse the River of Time”
Charles McGrath at The New York Times reviews Per Petterson’s new novel I Curse the River of Time: “…at moments when a lot of American prose seems fizzy and over-rich, the sentences in I Curse the River of Time go down like an eye-watering shot of aquavit.”
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Journalistic Disturbances
In 2009, Rivka Galchen wrote a lengthy piece in Harper’s about the quest to predict and control hurricanes. Now that her article is sadly apropos, it’s available for free on the web. (Said quest had a major role in the author’s excellent first novel.)
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Abandonment Issues
We give up a book for many reasons: it was too long, the writing was dull, it was written by E.L. James. Goodreads has charted just when and why we abandon books. Catch-22 is the number one abandoned book. (Confession: I didn’t finish it either.) Also, see our article on the pressures of finishing novels in the age of literary social media.
Photosynthesis?
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Gone in the Dark
“And so the book we have available to us is not the one she intended for us to see — and to those who knew her only as the private spouse of a public figure, Michelle McNamara emerges from these pages as much of a mystery as the Golden State Killer does, gone in the dark.” In Vulture, a profile of the late true crime writer Michelle McNamara whose book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, was published last week. From our archives: an essay on why one writer reads true crime novels.