Recommended Reading: Alexandra Alter on Greg Neri’s Tru & Nelle, an upcoming novel about Harper Lee and Truman Capote.
On Productive Friendships
Leap Before You Look
Can the art of teaching art actually be exhibited? A new exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston about the one-time Asheville, NC institution Black Mountain College asks just such questions. Black Mountain College was a controversial, short-lived bastion of free-thought and artistic expression which hosted such figures as Josef Albers, John Cage, and Robert Creeley from 1933 to 1957.
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Believe the Autocrat
"Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat – and won. I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now." Masha Gessen for The New York Review of Books.
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N.Y.C. vs. M.F.A. vs. R.I.P.
"I’m sure the ghost is fascinated by the N.Y.C. vs. M.F.A. debate, and would add that there’s a literary-world bias... toward writing done by the living." The New Yorker interviews Rebecca Curtis about ghost stories and her latest piece of short fiction, "The Pink House." For more about Curtis, check out our review of her debut collection Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money.
It Was Happening
"Stop smoking, first of all, and then don’t hold your breath, don’t cough, do not for any reason pick up heavy packages, boxes, suitcases. Never lean over, or dive headfirst into water. The carnal throes of passion were forbidden, because even an ardent kiss could cause my veins to burst." At long last, Lina Meruane’s semi-autobiographical novel Seeing Red has been published in English. Meruane has long been hailed as one of the most brilliant South American writers that American readers had probably never heard of.
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False Positive
At The New Yorker, Sarah Miller humorously learns why only positive book reviews might be a bad thing. "If St. Petersburg is the Little Engine That Could of city names, then the main character, Raskolnikov, is the Little Engine That Could of elderly pawnbroker murderers," she writes in her review of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.
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Game Theory
Recommended: Art of Fielding author Chad Harbach on sports novels.
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