“I’ve always loved memoir, but it’s still seen as such a trashy genre and I wanted to speak to it as actual literature because that’s how it feels to me.” Mary Karr sits down with The Rumpus to discuss The Art of Memoir. We recently posted an excerpt from and a review of the book.
Memoir and Literature
Tuesday New Release Day: Smith; Campbell; Moore; Brooks; Marra; Ōe; Niffeneger
Out this week: M Train by Patti Smith; Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories by Bonnie Jo Campbell; 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories edited by Lorrie Moore; The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks; The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra; Death by Water by Kenzaburō Ōe; and Ghostly: A Collection of Ghost Stories by Audrey Niffenegger. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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Unearthing Neruda
20 unpublished poems by Pablo Neruda were recently discovered. You can read one (in Spanish) over here. The poems will be published in Chile this year, and in Spain next year. Meanwhile, a local judge is not quite ready to abandon his probe into whether or not Neruda was poisoned – a theory that’s been reported for quite some time now.
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Speed is Addictive
If you were like this writer when you were growing up, you knew — nay, believed — that Sonic the Hedgehog was better than Mario, full stop. At The Verge, Trent Volbe explains the Blue Blur’s greatness, including a sample from the Green Hill Zone soundtrack to illustrate the games’ sick bass grooves.
On Creativity and Psychiatry
Good news for you! If you’re a creative person, you’re “no more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders than other people.” Bad news for your family! If you’re a creative person, you’re “more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, including anorexia and, to some extent, autism.”
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Founding, Growing, and Evolving ‘The Millions’
C. Max Magee looks back on the past 15 years as an online publisher, cataloging the lessons he learned founding and growing The Millions.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Murakami, Jobs, Nadas, Millet, Kahneman
It’s another huge week for new releases. Happy Murakami day! Haruki Murakami’s long-awaited 1Q84 is finally here – look for our review tomorrow, as is Walter Isaacson’s headline-making biography of Steve Jobs. Also out is another massive and hotly anticipated work in translation (1152 pages!), Hungarian Peter Nadas’s Parallel Stories. Lydia Millet has a new novel out, Ghost Lights, and Thinking, Fast and Slow is set to arrive from Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
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The True Face of the Earth
As Le Petit Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.” Perhaps that can be extrapolated for satellites, too. Either way, if this incredible, orbital HD Vimeo footage doesn’t move you, then I don’t know what could.