Need more than just a hashtag to get ready for the new season of True Detective? Tom Nolan is here to help. At Salon, Scott Timberg interviews the biographer of Ross Macdonald, a crime fiction writer whose mysteries tackled the underbelly of California. You might want to read the new collection of Ross’s novels, or else our list of crime novels where women are the detectives.
Pre-Detective
Playing the Victim
The Empathy Exams, a new collection of essays by Leslie Jamison, gets its title from a piece about medical acting that was published in The Believer. On the Harper’s blog, you can read an interview with Jamison, who calls her collection “a refusal to choose between these approaches — criticism, confession, journalism.” (Michelle Huneven interviewed Jamison for The Millions a couple of years ago.)
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Mistakes Happen
In 1864, Herman Melville was asked to submit a poem to a collection intended to raise funds for the United States Sanitary Commission – and he sent the wrong one.
Living Like Fitzgerald
Looking for a new summer home? Something with an impressive literary pedigree? You’re in luck! Now you can buy the house where F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gastsby for the low, low price of $3.8 million.
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Big Picture
The cartoonist Joe Sacco has a new graphic novel out that uses a twenty-four-foot panorama to depict the first day of the Battle of the Somme. At Salon, Sacco tells Daniel D’Addario that his upbringing in Australia, where the landings at Gallipoli have great patriotic significance, helped to spur his interest in the War to End All Wars. (Related: we interviewed Sacco last year.)
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“Does it help writers to drink?”
Writing for The Guardian, Blake Morrison ponders the eternal question: “does it help writers to drink? Do they drink any more heavily than any other social group – doctors, lawyers, shop assistants or … advertising executives?”
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