“I preach the radio. I do not preach thinking you must know what you are about. Faulkner had good drugs and a big radio. I recall having heard my own little radio at times. It is rare, yes, and it is, now, rarer. But you are young and have your juice, you’re still full of poop, which is the necessary requisite to tuning the radio. Got to be some poop out there, on the airwaves, or in there, in you, for you to tune it in. Cherish the poop you are full of, and work on excreting it with sound fundamentals. End of tantric wisdom.” The ever-entertaining Padgett Powell was interviewed over at LitHub for the release of his new book, Cries for Help, Various.
One Does Not Try
“The Snowy Day” Gets a Stamp Series
Iconic illustrations from Ezra Jack Keats‘ The Snowy Day will become part of the United States Postal Service’s “Forever” series. The four stamps will feature Peter, the little brown boy in his famous red snowsuit, in various states of play. See also: our own Edan Lepucki on children’s books and their grown-up counterparts.
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List of Lengthy Books
In honor of our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire (which stands at a hefty nine hundred pages), Bethanne Patrick has compiled a reading list of lengthy books at Lit Hub. You could also check out our interview with Hallberg.
A dimension of mind
There are two essays on the narrative genius behind The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling, over at Berfrois: Michael A. Moodian on how using genre tropes allowed Serling to tell politically volatile stories during the McArthy era of Hollywood, and Christopher Cappelluti takes a look at how The Twilight Zone changed television history.
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“An exile among exiles”
82-year-old Cuban poet Lorenzo Garcia Vega reflects upon his years of exile in the Latin American Herald Tribune.
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A Community of Writers
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Super YA
What if the Hulk kept a diary? Marvel Entertainment’s new young adult books mix superheroes with chicklit. The She-Hulk Diaries and Rogue Touch, featuring the X-Men super heroine as a teenager, are bringing romance back to comics. The biggest surprise, they’re actually good, according to critics at Wired.
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Novelistic Ambitions
David Kurnick explores what makes Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels so addictive. As he puts it, “In Ferrante we see what grand novelistic ambition looks like devoid of writerly vanity.” Pair with Cora Currier’s essay on reading Italy through Ferrante’s books.