There’s a tiff going on between Ursula le Guin and Kazuo Ishiguro. After le Guin accused Ishiguro of “despising” the fantasy genre, following an interview with the Times in which he wondered aloud if his readers would be prejudiced against his latest book, Ishiguro defended himself, claiming that he is “firmly on the side of the ogres and the pixies.” You can read a full rundown in The Guardian.
I’m With the Ogres
a small, diamond-like space
Rachel Syme set out to cover the failure of Dawn Powell’s diaries to sell at auction for the New Yorker and came away with a tender meditation on obsession, New York, and the business of biography.
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The Second Coming
“The trick to getting through your twenties intact, it seemed to me, was looking ahead to the narrative I could impose on that decade later in life.” The last book The Rumpus loved? Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
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Matthew Salesses on Calling Language Into Question
Matthew Salesses discusses how he shaped the language of adoption to fit his own experience.
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“Did you know that the Bosphorus is drying up?”
Orhan Pamuk paints a nightmarish picture of the land laid bare when the Bosphorus dries up.
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The Trouble With Memoirs
“If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.” Neil Genzlinger at the New York Times lays some ground rules for those compelled to write memoirs.
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