Alexandra Alter interviews National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates about the success of Between the World and Me. As he puts it, “The best part of writing is really to educate yourself. I don’t want to be anybody’s expert. I came in to learn.” Pair with our own Sonya Chung’s Millions piece on Coates’s epistolary essay.
Writing Educates the Self
Witches of Walgreens
In the spirit of Alex Mar’s Witches of America and Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1692, here’s a piece from Atlas Obscura on pinpointing the exact site of the Salem witch trials. Spoiler alert: it overlooks a Walgreens parking lot.
Kids These Days
“The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years,” says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning.
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“It really is a different life”
Donna Tartt has a new novel out, and with it come new interviews. At Salon, Laura Miller sits down with the author behind The Secret History.
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Stephenie Meyer’s Body Snatchers
A mini-excerpt from Stephenie Meyer‘s bestseller for adults, The Host, just out in paperback.
“I see how we are all the same”
Recommended Reading: An excerpt from White Girls by Hilton Als, which will be published this November.
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Tuesday New Release Day: McEwan; Moore; Patchett; Tea; Jufresa; Wayne; Silver; Frangello; Gottlieb; Karp; Collins; Kleeman
Out this week: Nutshell by Ian McEwan; Jerusalem by Alan Moore; Commonwealth by Ann Patchett; Black Wave by Michelle Tea; Umami by Laia Jufresa; Loner by Teddy Wayne; Little Nothing by Marisa Silver; Every Kind of Wanting by Gina Frangello; Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb; This Vast Southern Empire by Matthew Karp; When in French by Lauren Collins; and Intimations by Alexandra Kleeman. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
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Twain and Keller
Recommended Reading: An excerpt from The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2 in which the author has dinner with Helen Keller.
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