Judy Blume answered questions about life, writing, and her new book, In the Unlikely Event, on Alfred A. Knopf’s Tumblr on Wednesday. In case you haven’t checked it out, The Millions has a Tumblr, too.
Judy Blume on Tumblr
Dead Men May Tell Tales
“The eradication of Terry Pratchett’s unfinished works, the zeros and ones of his hard drive ground into the earth at the Great Dorset Steam Fair, is an imaginative exception to the rule.” The Paris Review questions how we publish an authors posthumous works and whether there’s a better way to do so. Pair with: our 2017 Select Literary Obituaries.
On Target
We might not get to choose between Peeta and Gale, but we can have Katniss Everdeen’s archery skills. Since The Hunger Games became popular, young girls are picking up bows and arrows more than ever before. Membership at USA Archery has doubled in the past two years, and people are buying recurve bows faster than they can make them. Perhaps they’d also enjoy the Hunger Games day camp we wrote about earlier.
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What Eats at You
“Define your character’s obsession. Take that obsession and dig up all the language that surrounds it or alludes to it. Rewrite your story using as much of that language as possible.” Molly Prentiss for Amazon Author Insights on using personal preoccupations to bring your narratives to life.
Vacationing with the Strayeds
At this point, we’re all familiar with Cheryl Strayed’s transformative solo hike of the Pacific Crest Trail that she wrote about in Wild. Yet at Condé Nast Traveler, she discusses how a recent family vacation to Laos reawakened her passion for travel. “Here we were on a sacred hill so far off from the place from which we had come, and so abundantly thankful for it. Perhaps the power of that very gratitude is the reason I travel.”
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So Much Depends Upon Firing You
We have finally reached peak Trump. In Hart Seely’s new book Bard of the Deal, three decades of Donald Trump speeches and interviews have been reworked into what the publisher is calling a “treasury of spoken poetry.” One can only hope there’s a poem titled, “Bored With Winning.”
Jack Kerouac’s Journals
It’s hard to resist reading others’ diary entries, especially when the diaries in question belong to famous writers. Now that a selection of Jack Kerouac‘s journals is being released from The New Yorker archives and made available online, resistance is more or less futile. Originally published in 1998, these journal entries span the years from 1948 to 1950, from just after the long drive that inspired On the Road to the publication of Kerouac’s first book, The Town and the City.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Rowling, Homes, Stein, Wilson, Moehringer, Tejpal, Silver, Young, Warner, Donoghue
Another bumper crop of books this week is led by J.K Rowling’s post-Potter effort, The Casual Vacancy is on shelves, as are May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes, Canvas by Benjamin Stein, Panorama City by Antoine Wilson, Sutton by J.R. Moehringer, Tarun J. Tejpal’s debut The Story of my Assassins. On the non-fiction side, Nate Silver’s long-awaited The Signal and the Noise is here, as is Neil Young’s memoir Waging Heavy Peace. New in paperback: John Warner’s Funny Man (the edition includes an essay by Warner that ran on The Millions) and Emma Donoghue’s blockbuster The Room.