I’ve told you about The Atlantic’s By Heart series plenty of times before. This week brings us novelist Paul Lisicky taking a close look at how Flannery O’Connor’s “flawed” characters are the ones we find ourselves drawn to most.
A Good Character Is Hard To Find
Tao Lin Interviews Ben Lerner
Tao Lin interviews Leaving the Atocha Station author Ben Lerner for The Believer. You can also check out an excerpt from Lerner’s book here.
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Sasha’s Favorite Albums
Sasha Frere-Jones, who you may know from his work at The New Yorker, has listed his favorite albums of 2011, and even put together a Spotify playlist of some of his favorite singles. Isn’t that nice of him?
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On the State of Syrian Publishing
The Syrian publishing industry is but one of the casualties in the nation’s ongoing civil war. “The whole of publishing is not more than 10 percent of what it was in the past,” says Samer al-Kadri who runs Bright Fingers Publishing House in Damascus.
“There’s potential on Twitter for wild formal invention.”
If you’ve finished reading David Mitchell’s latest short story – which was published on Twitter last week and then ran on our site five days ago – you’ll appreciate Ian Crouch’s look at its greater meaning, and what it could mean for Twitter as a whole.
There Once Was a Girl
Recommended Reading: “There Once Was a Girl” by Katy Waldman at Slate. “Anorexia is the mental health equivalent of the red shoes that make you dance until you die. It is a performance—of femininity, of damage, of power—that turns into a prison.”
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