Between Life and Death

The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas made headlines when it acquired the David Foster Wallace archives. Now it’s added another high profile author to its collection: J. M. Coetzee.

“Books can be dangerous objects–under their influence people start to wonder, dream, and think.” In “celebration” of Banned Book Week, the New York Public Library has a quiz for you to find out how much you know about the freedom to read. See also our tribute to The Bluest Eye, one of the United States’ most challenged books.

A few weeks ago, Meghan Daum released an essay collection, The Unspeakable, which our own Hannah Gersen described as “unputdownable” in her Millions review. At Slate, Katy Waldman offers her own praise, writing that “these essays do what essays often set out to do: trace the outlines of a self.”

There was an article in the New York Times on cook book ghostwriters, and it called Gwyneth Paltrow out for not writing My Father’s Daughter. Then the actress cum gourmand denied having worked with a ghostwriter in a tweet. Now Sari Botton, a frequent ghostwriter, has tried to clear the whole thing up in an essay on The Rumpus on why ghostwriting is such a fickle business, and a tricky term.

Everything we think about Henry David Thoreau is wrong.

The winner of this year’s Dzanc Books/Disquiet International Literary Program Award for fiction is Sofi Stambo. Here’s a rather savage piece of hers over at Guernica Magazine.