The second time Eudora Welty met William Faulkner, the latter brought the former out on a ride in his boat. She wrote a letter to Jean Stafford in 1949 that described the experience in entertaining detail. At The Paris Review Daily, you can read the letter in full. Pair with: James McWilliams on Faulkner’s novel The Reivers.
Two Bards
Interviews with Ambitious Readers
HTMLGiant is running a cool series of interviews with readers who recently finished long or difficult books. Check out their takes on Lee Child’s Echo Burning, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and William Gaddis’s The Recognitions over here, here, and here, respectively. Also, while on the topic of difficult books, check out Emily Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg’s round-up of their ten top picks.
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Something Whole
“The short story, as a form, has plenty of defenders,” the collection of unconnected short stories, maybe not so much. In an essay for LitHub, regular Millions contributor Jonathan Russell Clark praises the unlinked stories of Barbara the Slut and Other People and Single, Carefree, Mellow because “despite a lack of the wholeness of a novel, something complete and true and hard-won emerges by the end.”
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