“I don’t divide my friendships into continental categories. I don’t think: Today I’ll have lunch with my European friend, and tomorrow I will invite my Asian friend to the park. It would be silly of me to think of the authors I read in those terms. End of topic.” The (still relatively) new Literary Hub interviews Valeria Luiselli about the literary tradition, authors’s names, magical realism and her new novel, The Story of My Teeth.
Against “Continental Categories”
Speaking in Tongues
“What do I want to say with this new language that I can’t say in my native language—or any other language that currently exists?” From The Lord of the Rings to A Game of Thrones, Josephine Livingstone explores the history of invented languages, over at The New Republic.
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Reread Nation
Why do we reread novels obsessively as children but hardly ever as adults? At The Morning News, Clay Risen discusses why rereading appeals to children so much. "It was a residual sense of wonder, left over long after I had accepted that the reality on the page and the reality beyond it are distinct." Pair with: Our essay on the pleasures and perils of rereading.
DIAGRAM’s 2012 Essay Contest
The deadline for DIAGRAM’s annual essay contest is fast approaching. Past winners include Peter Jay Shippy’s “Goonies: or Wallace Stevens's 'The Snowman'--an Essay in 7 Films” and (my all-time favorite) Cheyenne Nimes’s “SECTION 404 OF THE CLEAN WATER ACT AND THE SANTA CRUZ RIVER SAND SHARK, SUBTITLED ‘THIS TROUBLESOME REGULATORY CONSTRAINT’.”
Dun-Dun
Planning on writing a prison scene? Worried your characters might sound a bit unrealistic? Then see if you can get your hands on the Bonne Terre dictionary. Written by inmates at a prison in Louisiana, the dictionary includes such idiosyncratic terms as “boat,” meaning a plastic bed, and “pumpkin,” meaning a new inmate.
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Thomas Pynchon: The Comic Strip
Galley Cat highlights a 2003 comic strip, "Thomas Pynchon, Man of Mystery," that is unfortunately yet to go into syndication.
Boyhood Tales
Random House is releasing a collection of previously unpublished poems and stories from Truman Capote’s youth, recently found in the archives of the New York Public Library. Over at Full Stop, Jacob Kiernan examines the keen political conscience in Capote’s never-before-published work. As he explains it, “While his early stories are structurally simple, they evince a prescient social conscience.”
One Award To Rule Them All
Over at Book Riot, Jeff O'Neal's asking readers to vote for their favorite literary award… based on the quality of each one's backlist.
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Publishing’s Other Imbalance Problem
“The reality is, there are just not a lot of POC authors out there,” writes Ellen Oh in her essay on non-white authors. “We are not representing the 37% of our population when we only amount to 10% of publishing.”
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