“Pink Trance Notebooks is the mind working, is material rising from somewhere deep to be shaped and reshaped into blocks of dreamlike text. It is also surface: material gathered from within reach.” Sarah Gerard at Hazlitt in an interview with Wayne Koestenbaum, whose new book is out in October.
Non-Directional Horniness
The Sentences of one ZS.
Last night I went to see Zadie Smith read and chat at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. I wrote a little #LitBeat about it, which makes it officially NW day at The Millions, given today’s main page review.
O Health Coach! My Health Coach!
“To you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of fortune, idler, the same advice. Up!” Walt Whitman, health nut and paleo dieter–resist carbs, obey red meat!
“PV”
After sixteen years of work, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, “the world’s only celebrity translation team,” have finally finished translating all of Tolstoy, ending with last fall’s Hadji Murat. Humanities interviews them, and back in 2009, so did we.
Writing for Airports
Evidently, Alain de Botton has recovered from the unfavorable New York Times review of his latest book, The Pleasures of Sorrow and Work, for which he excoriated reviewer Caleb Crain, claiming that Crain “killed [his] book in the United States.” De Botton was just named Heathrow Airport’s first writer-in-residence. During his week tenure at a desk in Terminal 5, he will record his observations in “real time,” with his typing appearing on a screen behind him. Afterward, the entries will be collected and published as a book, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary.
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I lucked out with those blurbs
An interview with Tom Bissell in which he drops this gem while talking about John Jeremiah Sullivan and Geoff Dyer: “I prefer to think of that kind of nonfiction as a voice whispering to you in the night. “