A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is scooping up award nominations left and right. Given the relative heaping of praise, it’s interesting to hear a dissenting voice. This review from the London Review of Books offers us just that. If it’s more Yanagihara you’re after, here she is in a recent interview for The Millions.
Ostentatiously Withholding Information?
Butterball HR
McSweeney’s takes us behind the scenes of the Butterball hotline during the holiday craziness. You could also check out Alexander Cockburn’s short piece on Thanksgiving.
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All the Beginnings Have Endings
“Every story I have ever told has a kind of breach to it, I think. You could say that my writing isn’t quite right. That all the beginnings have endings in them.” Lidia Yuknavitch, who recently published an essay, “There is No Map for Grief,” in the Millions, now has an essay on violence, beauty and and storytelling in Guernica.
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Hello Stranger
It’s already mid-morning, but have you really started writing yet? If you’re procrastinating, it might be because you see your future self as a stranger. Psychologists believe that because we don’t know who we will be years from now, we fail to make good decisions for the long term. Perhaps both your current and future selves can agree you just want to finish that novel already.
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I Want to Go to There
“[I]t’s important that people begin to understand that whiteness is not inevitable, and that white dominance is not inevitable.” Claudia Rankine talks to The Guardian about her plans for the Racial Imaginary Institute, a think-tank-cum-gallery that she’s founding with all that MacArthur Genius cash. See also: why Americans love poetry, but not poetry books.
Pathological Point-Making
Recommended Reading: Vinson Cunningham at The New Yorker on what makes an essay “American.”
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Unpredictable Lit
“These people may not take you seriously. And your boss might not either. Or your dentist or your best friend from middle school. But you who does take you seriously? Dictators. Dictators take you very seriously. Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and Augusto Pinochet, all rounded up writers and artists in short order. They could not afford to have the unpredictability of literature at large while they were trying to create a totalitarian state.” Wendy Willis on subversion through writing for The Rumpus.
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