Recommended reading: The Awl takes a look at the “attempt to create a completely logical, absolutely universal language,” which goes about as well as you’d expect (read: not very).
“The Realest Language”
More Steve Jobs
In 1985, Steve Jobs was interviewed for Playboy. (Note: link is safe for work)
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Reclusive Reading
Emily Dickinson didn't get out much, so why should we have to in order to read her work? Her open access manuscripts, letters, and envelope scribbles are now available online in the Emily Dickinson Archive. But now there's controversy over who is the rightful owner of her manuscripts and who should shape the archives — Harvard or Amherst?
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“If only we hadn’t read it before.”
"The stories that dominated the serious magazines and journals seemed to share a flat fireless quality... Characters dropped half out of love, or endured a minor crisis, or just wandered around treasuring their sense of dismay about, you know, the fallenness of the world." In case you missed it: Slate's review of Stuart Dybek's new collection of stories, Paper Lantern, also delivers an acerbic take on the modernist past and current "revitalization" of the American short story.
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Charles Bock Interviewed
Charles Bock (Beautiful Children), in a recent interview, sounding perturbed: "Where are you right now? I’m in a writer’s room in Manhattan. There’s all these other people with their fucking computers doing their stupid little bullshit. It feels pointless. You wanna feel like it matters. It’s hard to do that when you’re in a room like this. At least it’s quiet."
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A Girl Is a Fully-Formed Thing
“The things I do not want to write about become the things I write about.” Year in Reading alumnus Eimear McBride talks to The Guardian on the occasion of her second novel's arrival. The Lesser Bohemians follows upon her hugely successful debut, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, which we reviewed back when it came out in the U.S.
Fifty Years of Naked Lunch
A Friday afternoon pharmacy lesson at Stop Smiling: an interview with William Boroughs, celebrating 50 years of Naked Lunch.
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