Payday
James McBride on How the Writing Chooses You
James McBride discusses his latest book, Deacon King Kong, as well as the importance of writing without regard for other people's expectations.
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It Certainly Beats the Overlook
Now this is the kind of fellowship an author can really get behind: The Standard, East Village, has teamed up with The Paris Review to offer a free hotel room to a writer in need of “three weeks of solitude in downtown New York City.” The deadline for applications is November 1. And in case you’re wondering, the answer is yes. Of course the fellowship will conclude with a swank cocktail party.
How Animals Think
Recommended reading: “Can Fiction Show Us How Animals Think?” Or is the realist novel the wrong form for exploring “the profoundly foreign interior lives of animals?”
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Ever Thus
Recommended Reading: Gary Krist on the friendship-gone-wrong of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway.
YiR, BOMB Edition
“It’s not often that I find myself brandishing my copy and yelling, ‘This book.This book! at my husband, but I had that pleasant, awed, envy-inducing reaction.” We obviously love a good end-of-year reading roundup, and BOMB Magazine has “Looking Back on 2016” with entries from Jonathan Lethem, Will Chancellor, and other artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers.
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“That’s Just My Life and It Seems Quite Normal to Me.”
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Less than Horrible
In the latest edition of By the Book, Neil Patrick Harris explains his love of Gone Girl, Steve Martin, and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. We’ve written about the series in the past — you might want to look back on the entries by Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Colson Whitehead.
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