This interview with Joanna Walsh, creator of the #Readwomen Twitter account and fiction editor at 3:AM Magazine, is just plain fun. In it, Walsh touches on nearly everything from sex writing to Sigmund Freud to the Marx Brothers.
9.5 Pornographic Fairy Tales
The Illustrated Road
Recommended Viewing: Paul Rogers illustrated every page of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
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Because Language
Because internet we have a new preposition. Yes, that’s right the word “because” is no longer a mere subordinating conjunction but also a preposition. We challenge someone to write an entire short story with this preposition or at least a poem because literature.
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On Negative Book Reviews
“An appeal for the revival of the negative book review, then, is a remonstration against forced and foppish praise, where everything is good and so nothing at all is good.” In The Baffler, Rafia Zakaria writes in praise of negative book reviews and decries the “enfeebling of literary criticism.” From our archives: our own Emily St. John Mandel writes about bad book reviews.
Tuesday New Release Day: Knausgaard; Straub; Zentner; Collins; Bird; Henderson; Hopkins
Book Three of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle is out this week, as is a new novel by Millions contributor Emma Straub. Also out: The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner; The Untold by Courtney Collins; Above the East China Sea by Sarah Bird; Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson; and a new volume of the Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2014 Book Preview.
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Man-Keyv
Emily Dickinson wrote her poetry in a house in Amherst. Mark Twain wrote many of his best works on his estate in Connecticut. And Geoffrey Chaucer, it turns out, wrote in a cramped bachelor pad, nestled in the east side of the wall surrounding London. In The Spectator, a reading of Paul Strohm’s Chaucer’s Tale, which describes a pivotal year in the poet’s life.
Sleeping Like a Genius
Stay up until 4am reading that new release? Dread your early alarm after a night spent with a book? Maybe you’re just on Flaubert‘s schedule. Or, if you find it easy to fall asleep before midnight and enjoy early mornings, perhaps you’re running on Victor Hugo time. New York Magazine has compiled an infographic of the sleeping habits of geniuses, and the good news is that no matter when you fall asleep and wake up, someone brilliant has more or less kept your same schedule. So take heart, late-night readers and early risers. We’re all in good company.
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47 New Ways to Bid Arms Goodbye
Apparently Faulkner isn’t the only modernist getting a little repackaging. A new edition of A Farewell to Arms that includes each of the 47 endings Hemingway wrote for the novel will be published later this week.
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The Real Slim
Few people have heard of Iceberg Slim, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been important. His autobiography, published in 1967, tells the story of his life as a pimp, and one of his novels, Trick Baby, was made into a 1972 movie. He’s been called “the Mark Twain of hip-hop.” At Salon, Scott Timberg talks with Justin Gifford, the author of a new biography of Slim.
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