Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt by Kristin Hersh is a downright mesmerizing elegy to the eclectic singer-songwriter. Part idiot-savant, part deliberate curmudgeon , Vic Chesnutt (who Rolling Stone has called one of the greatest songwriters of all time) was notoriously difficult to spend a lot of time around. Hersh stopped by Electric Literature for an interview about the book and about losing her dear friend Vic. Bonus: for anyone unfamiliar with Chesnutt’s work, this video will get you close.
Everything I Say
Wonders of Wonderbook
This one goes out to all the visual learners out there. Here's a helpful, illustrated guide to writing scenes and stories with Jeff VanderMeer, author of the bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy. Bonus: here's an interview by VanderMeer with author Richard House from earlier this year.
●
●
Just Another Mason
In general, we think of translators as people whose job, briefly summarized, is to create elegant texts out of works in foreign languages. But J.R.R. Tolkien, in his translation of Beowulf, set out to do something different. The Lord of the Rings author published a translation that he kept intentionally clunky. Why? In his telling, he did it to better imitate Old English.
●
●
Gatsby That Almost Were
From Letters of Note, the correspondence between Fitzgerald and his editor upon the former's completion of The Great Gatsby (including Fitzgerald's suggestion for an alternative title: Gold-hatted Gatsby). In response to the many endings of A Farewell to Arms, Slate cooks up 48 canned, alternative endings for Fitzgerald's masterpiece.
●
●
But Then Again, Who Wouldn’t Be?
I'm not that into ballet, but if I had to be, I'd be into 1,000 frame-per-second footage of German ballet dancers prancing around to a dance-y remix of Radiohead's "Everything In Its Right Place."
●
●
The Root of Fantasy
Recommended Reading: Bret Anthony Johnston on (not) writing what you know. His essay is an excerpt of Writer's Notebook II, published by the folks at Tin House. (Related: we published Harper's editor Christopher Beha's essay in the book last year.)
●
●