Over at the Story Prize blog, Year in Reading alumnus Colum McCann shares a letter of advice to writers starting their career. As he puts it, “A story begins long before its first word. It ends long after its last… [it] reveal[s] a truth that isn’t yet there.”
Letters to a Young Writer
For the Sake of Cohesion
“Setting is often the last piece of the jigsaw. I start somewhere else—with a kind of a premise, a set of relationships, a theme—and I often have a long period when I can’t figure out where the story should be put down. I find myself going location hunting. Not just for a time and place, but also for a genre, if you like.” Kazuo Ishiguro on the Hazlitt podcast. For more things Ishiguro, here is our own Lydia Kiesling’s review of Ishiguro’s latest novel, The Buried Giant.
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“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”
Does the central, eponymous poem from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire stand on its own as a literary masterwork?
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No Multiverse For Old Men
Recommended Reading: This dizzying essay from Seb Sutcliffe at 3:AM Magazine on quantum theory in the world of the Coen Brothers. Here’s a complementary essay from The Millions on DVD commentary and paratext novels.
I Mean, Why Not?
Two minutes of gorgeous West Indian manatee footage, and you’d better believe I’m linking to it.
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e-lending leads to more reading?
According to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life project, library patrons borrowing ebooks tend to read more than readers who aren’t borrowing ebooks. Galley Cat parsed some of the data if you’ want the short rather than the long of it.
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On Reviewers, and Paying Them
LA Review of Books editor in chief Tom Lutz has written about the future of book reviews and “a missing generation of journalists.”
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