Halloween might be over, but the season of freakishly large decorative gourds lives on. Here’s a fascinating essay from The Toast on how to raise enormous pumpkins–county fair, here we come.
Shellacked Decorative Vegetables
The Sunshine(?) State
Was Miami made for the mystery novel? The most iconic mysteries and detective novels are anchored firmly in their sense of place, and no place is more hospitable to commodifiable crime and violence than sunny South Beach. If it's more Florida weirdness you're after, look no further than our own Nick Moran.
“Death to the Minibar!”
Anyone who travels a lot will enjoy Dubravka Ugresic's essay on hotel minibars. As a matter of fact, just about anyone will enjoy this essay regardless of how often they travel.
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#SalterProblems
“I suppose the truth is I became a little self-conscious about people telling me how much they loved my sentences,” says James Salter in his interview with Jonathan Lee. “It’s flattering, but it seemed to me that this love of sentences was in some sense getting in the way of the book itself.” As it happens, our own Sonya Chung reviewed Salter’s latest book this week, and she, too, remarked on Salter’s desire “to ‘get past the great writer-of-sentences thing,’ and presumably the ‘writers’ writer’ thing.”
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Another Veselka Novel on the Way
Zazen author Vanessa Veselka announced on Tuesday that she has sold her second novel. Unfortunately, she doesn’t reveal many more details than that, so we’re all going to have to bide our time until then.
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“Great pendulous melons dangled like gods”
Recommended Reading: “The Pumpkin Tree” by Robert Wrigley.
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Listen Up!
Don DeLillo spoke in Chicago last week, after receiving the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Adam Daniels, our intrepid #LitBeat correspondent, reports.
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