Recommended Viewing: Peter Witte’s drawings that explain his problem with bacon.
Baconian
Joan Didion: Model
Joan Didion: celebrated essayist and author, subject of upcoming crowd-funded documentary, style icon and model?
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Body Language
I’ve written before about By Heart, a series at The Atlantic in which authors write short pieces about their favorite passages in literature. This week, our own Edan Lepucki — whose new novel you may have heard about thanks to Stephen Colbert — writes about the metaphors in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. (FYI, Margaret Atwood wrote a Year in Reading entry for The Millions.)
Fact-Checking Fiasco
What do you think gets fact-checked the most rigorously: newspaper articles, magazine stories, or books? If you guessed books, you’d be surprised to know that they are rarely, if ever, fact-checked. At The Atlantic, Kate Newman questions why we have so much faith in books’ accuracy but why publishers don’t bother.
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Rejection Romanticized
Recommended Reading: Kavita Das on why writers shouldn’t romanticize rejection. “Not only is it harder for writers of color to get published, but when rejecting our work, publishers tell us that what we’re writing about is too narrow and niche and won’t appeal to mainstream audiences.” Our own Bill Morris writes about the sorry state of rejection letters and literary magazine editors take your questions about them.
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“I would leave everything here”
Recommended Reading: László Krasznahorkai’s “I Don’t Need Anything from Here,” which might be one of the shortest sentences he’s ever written.
The Tactile Comic Book
A designer from Copenhagen, Philipp Meyer (not the novelist), has created the first comic book for the blind. “Most of the tactile material that is available for blind people is very information dense. It’s always about information and not often about art,” he says.
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