Recommended Reading: Justin Taylor on Sam Lipsyte’s The Fun Parts and how “attention to language at the molecular level” creates a better experience reading and writing. Pair with our review of Taylor’s Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever.
Molecular Language
P.S.
The summer issue of Prairie Schooner has a short story of mine in it, as well as other good stuff, for most of which a subscription is required. You don’t need one, however, to read this short interview (very much in keeping with the Where We Write theme).
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The New Translators
Since they got married and began working 33 years ago, Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear have translated around 30 works of Russian literature, from The Brothers Karamazov to Doctor Zhivago. Now their interview with the Paris Review is available online from the Literary Hub, and this seems as good a time as ever to bring up that constant debate: who’s greater, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?
A Legitimate Scandal
Every writer’s nightmare: plagiarism. If you tuned in to Melania Trump’s RNC speech, you may have noticed something familiar… Some of her lines were plagiarized from Michelle Obama’s 2008 DNC speech.
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Decolonizing the Card Catalog
A Howard University librarian named Dorothy Porter made it her mission to collect and preserve works related to the global black experience.
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Where She Was From
For only $1.65 million, you can have a piece of Joan Didion’s childhood. Her high school home, The Didion House, is on the market in Sacramento. Before you make a bid, it might be good to brush up on California with Didion’s 2003 memoir, Where I Was From.
A Suitable Adaptation
“We are here to take creative risks and to do the sort of work that commercial broadcasters might be more reluctant to do. But we also have a real responsibility and a requirement to reflect a range of British communities.” Bestill our hearts, the BBC is adapting Vikram Seth‘s A Suitable Boy as its first period drama with a non-white cast, reports The Telegraph. Our own Lydia Kiesling described Seth’s epic as “a spectacularly romantic novel, weddings all over,” but noted sadly that “it portends falling in love with the man you can marry, in lieu of the one that you can’t.”
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