Recommended Reading: Daniel Arnold’s Nervous Breakdown self-interview, which follows an excerpt of his new story collection, Snowblind.
Snowbound
Dificil
Growing up, Judy Bolton-Fasman watched her mother study Don Quixote, propping the book up on their kitchen counter while studying for her Master’s in Spanish literature. Her mother was a native speaker, but Cervantes was still a tough writer to figure out, especially if you were reading his work while trying to cook dinner in the background. The author looks back on her mother’s education in a Saturday Essay for The Rumpus.
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Ecstasy/Despair
Shouldn’t you be busy writing? Here’s an illustrated guide to some of the common anxieties many of us feel when we’re not writing.
I like big food and I cannot lie
The appeal of larger food packaging is, apparently, linked to a hunger for socioeconomic status rather than the rumblings of the stomach.
At Long Last
The Modern Language Association has finally weighed in on how to cite tweets in academic papers.
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Tiny Worlds
Recommended Reading: On the great depth and detail of tiny worlds in Ploughshares. An example of these worlds, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories takes short fiction “to the extreme.”
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Doing the Academic Stuff
“You’re never going to write well for a wider audience if you think it’s less worthwhile, less difficult than doing the academic stuff.” Jo Livingstone interviews David Wolf, commissioning editor of The Guardian Long Read.
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Wood on JJS
Critic and occasional Millions commenter James Wood has added his own two cents to the growing collection of Pulphead reviews.
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The mind of a writer
Scientists confirmed recently that writers are more likely to struggle with mental illness (sometimes, as recently noted, due to syphilis). Since we’re so used to our alcoholic literary greats, and a smattering of suicidal ones (Plath, Woolf, Thompson, Wallace–and many more), this comes as no great surprise. On a happier note, a new study using fMRIs and MFA students has found that writers show different brain patterns than “normal people” just writing: in fact they resemble “expert” thinking patterns of all professionals doing what they’re best at–musicians, athletes, competitive Scrabble players. I don’t know if I’m happier to learn the fMRIs found no gaping black holes, or that MFAs do in fact teach you something.
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