Ernest Hemingway, “the godfather of long-form” nonfiction? Richard Brody argues so in the New Yorker, citing Hemingway’s autobiographical, and wildly ambitious, The Green Hills of Africa.
Long-form Godfather
Chang-rae Lee on Writing and Re-writing the Immigrant Novel
Chang-rae Lee discusses his picaresque novel, My Year Abroad, and how he finds himself drawn to characters that are outside of the mainstream.
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The Ministry of Fear
“Nowadays, we tend to place spies into a cold war narrative: East vs. West, intrigue around the Berlin Wall, Graham Greene’s Vienna, and George Smiley’s London. But the first and most successful Soviet spies emerged much earlier.”
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Interview interviews, Vacationers vacation, etc., etc.
Interview, well, interviews Emma Straub on beach reads, vacation, and The Vacationers. Bonus: Elizabeth von Arnim‘s The Enchanted April is mentioned, and if you haven’t already read the book or seen the movie, please do so immediately.
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Little Ones
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New Norman Rush
New Yorker book critic James Wood dropped in on our “Best of the Millennium” piece on Norman Rush’s Mortals and offered this tidbit, “I think [Rush’s] next book — his first to be set in America — will be unlike anything he has written before.”
Always Watching
Neurotic writers or friends-of-writers are likely to have asked themselves an uncomfortable question: do the writers I know use my foibles for material? At The New Statesman, Oliver Farry lists a number of proofs that they do, citing Dante’s Inferno, Madame Bovary and Beckett’s debut novel Murphy.