Recommended Reading: Clare Beams writes for Ploughshares about the effect of reading a story in which someone reads a story.
Reading about Reading
Cormac McCopyEditor
Cormac McCarthy helped copy edit Lawrence M. Krauss's Quantum Man, a biography of the physicist Richard Feynman. But, seriously, can anyone prove it wasn't really McCarthy's Yelp review doppelgänger?
Eisenberg Wins the PEN/Faulkner
Deborah Eisenberg has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. (Eisenberg profiled at The Millions.)
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Stephen King Talks about a New Story
Stephen King talks to James Parker of The Atlantic about how his new short story came to be, his writing process, and the state of fiction today. He also manages to work in his opinions on Judas Priest and Metallica. Read "Herman Wouk is Still Alive" here.
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Sincerely, John Updike
"James Schiff, an associate professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, is working on a volume of Updike’s letters and has unearthed thousands of letters, postcards, and notes the author sent to complete strangers who wrote to him." The Guardian writes about an in-progress book of John Updike's letters that reveals how often the writer corresponded with not only his contemporaries, like John Barth and Joyce Carol Oates, but his readers as well. See also: an essay about the personal and literary relationship between Barth and Updike.
9.5 Pornographic Fairy Tales
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.
Basketball, Poetry, and the Union of the Two
Inua Ellams wrote a poem entitled “Portrait of Prometheus as a Basketball Player” in which he imagined “the fire stolen from the gods to be shaped as a basketball, and Prometheus dunking light into the world.” [Note: Ctrl + F for “Portrait of Prometheus” at this link to read the poem.] Over at Magma, Ellams discusses “the process of composing a poem, as a coach might stitch a [basketball] team together.” Perhaps all of this explains Patricia Lockwood’s interest in Shaquille O’Neal?
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The Size Queens release iBook/Album “To The Country”
The Size Queens re-conceptualize the album with their release of To The Country, a hybrid iBook/album whose “interpenetrations of song, text, and image” aim to generate new narrative forms. Band member/author Adam Klein writes: “We create these imagined worlds together, simultaneously uncontaminated and corrupted, through metaphor and code. ‘The country’ and the new world of applications are always polyvalent; it is impossible to make them remain at our service.” Also! This textual/aural collaboration features original stories by Lynne Tillman, Rick Moody, Maria Bustillos, and Joy Williams (first line reads: "Daddy didn’t want to be a social being and he didn’t want us to be social beings so here we are.") Download To The Country here (it’s free!) and read/listen/weep.
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