Recommended Reading: Daniel Arnold’s Nervous Breakdown self-interview, which follows an excerpt of his new story collection, Snowblind.
Snowbound
Sullivanless Sullivan
John Jeremiah Sullivan is working on abandoning the “slightly exaggerated pastiche of himself as narrator” that’s driven most of his essays so far.
I’m Not Sexist
“Their deliberately childless life, their cat, Converse (named not for the shoe but for the political scientist), their free-range beef and nights and weekends of reading and grading and high-quality television series—it was fine and a little horrible. She gets it.” It shouldn’t take much convincing to get you to go and read some new fiction by Curtis Sittenfeld, Gender Studies, over at The New Yorker.
●
●
He’s Got Game. Literary Game.
I could tease and build up Allison Hill‘s article on “Literary Seductions“, or I could just let the first line entice you on its own: “I once slept with a man because he gave me a copy of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.”
●
●
Hello Byliner
Byliner, a sleek new site that features narrative non-fiction from around the web (and for the most part from the usual suspects, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, et al.) has launched. The Nieman Journalism Lab covers the launch.
●
●
Perilous Trips
“To be a Patrick Leigh Fermor, a Colin Thubron, a Norman Douglas or Paul Theroux, requires always saying yes. To not-get-raped, according to every lesson I – and so many other women – have been taught, so often requires saying no.” On the paradox of being a women and a travel writer.
●
●
Maybe Now You Can Understand It.
Artist John Vernon Lord drew inspiration from Irish literature’s “books of the dark” to adapt James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into a series of illustrated images. Over at The Guardian, Lord discusses how he developed some of his pages.
●
●