We’ve covered the Atlantic series By Heart a number of times before. It features notable authors writing about their favorite passages. In the latest edition, Mary-Beth Hughes picks out a paragraph from Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, about a poet who’s trying to cope with grief. Sample quote: “Reading Fitzgerald, I felt it was possible to write as I’d experienced dancing.”
Pirouettes
Letter to Detroit
“The city has the beckoning power of a black hole or the Italian countryside or a castle. There is no way to explain our wiring to someone whose fairytale has always ended somewhere like Florida.” Aisha Sabatini Sloan on calling Detroit home, over at The Offing. Also check out Bill Morris’s Millions piece on movies set in the city.
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He’s on the Fence
On Wednesday, the BBC Radio 4 program Four Thought broadcasted an essay by our own Mark O’Connell that lays out a novel argument: we should embrace the value of ambivalence. (We’re not sure how to feel about that.)
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Celebs to Read to You
Audible is bringing out the big guns for its new A-List collection, a series of audio books read by celebs, including Samuel L. Jackson narrating A Rage in Harlem and Anne Hathaway doing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
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The Nervous Breakdown
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the new books and culture website The Nervous Breakdown. They’ve already got a great interview with Millions favorite Dan Chaon, as well as some interesting essays that I’m looking forward to digging into. I also like their “self-interview” series–where writers ask, and answer, their own questions.
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Virginia in Vogue
Look back on an article Virginia Woolf wrote for Vogue in 1924. Staff writer emeritus Emily Colette Wilkinson tackles Woolf’s difficult text, To the Lighthouse.
Ask Her About Her Uterus
“Too often, a woman’s pain is not merely met with doubt, but suspicion, both within the medical community and outside of it.” The New Republic writes about female pain, the medical community, and Abby Norman‘s book, Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain.