“Is the reason to have a home, as the narrator in Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, asserts, ‘to keep certain people in and everyone else out’? Or does home, as the narrator in William Maxwell’s autobiographical novel So Long, See You Tomorrow suggests, work primarily as a scaffolding of known things — as a place to read, a place to stash the damp umbrella, a place to listen to the porch swing creak?” Beth Kephart on the literary significance of home.
Home Is Where the Story Begins
Joyce Carol Oates on Mourning and Writer as Persona
In the Atlantic's annual fiction supplement, Joyce Carol Oates writes about the loss of her husband of 48 years and the split identity of the well-known writer: "My job at the university is to impersonate 'Joyce Carol Oates' [...] this quasi-public self [...] is scarcely visible to me, as a mirror-reflection, seen up close, is scarcely visible to the viewer."
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Walter Kirn’s Underwear
"For Mr. Kirn, 51, who indeed brims with an outer confidence that can be intimidating at times to those unused to brash, creative types who dress in custom cowboy boots and seem indifferent to the modest niceties of literary image, the loud underwear seems to be working this afternoon." If this doesn't read like the typical author profile that's because Walter Kirn interviewed himself for The New York Times on his new book, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade. Here's our review.
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Two Trailers from Two Dollar Radio Moving Pictures
Recently I reported on the launch of Two Dollar Radio Moving Pictures, a cinematic venture from the indie publishers in Ohio. Since then, a pair of teaser trailers have been released for the first films in the organization’s pipeline. One is for The Greenbrier Ghost, which was co-written by Crapalachia author Scott McClanahan. The second is for The Removals, and it was directed by Orange Eats Creeps author Grace Krilanovich. (A few years back I gave TOEC some love in my Year In Reading post.)
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John Crow’s Devil
Has the drudgery of submitting poems, stories, and manuscripts ever gotten you down? Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize winner A Brief History of Seven Killings, had his first novel rejected by nearly eighty publishing houses. Here’s a take on self-publishing from The Millions if all of this has got you down.
Activist Art
Over at Hyperallergic, art, activism, and literature collide in When We Fight, We Win!: Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World by Greg Jobin-Leeds and AgitArte. Pair with our own Bill Morris’s review of The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.
Oh, and congrats, btw.
"I Didn't Tell Facebook I'm Engaged, So Why Is It Asking About My Fiancé?" or, FB continues to make people feel a little awkward.
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Voice to the Voiceless
"Even though journalism is a good profession, for me it was very constraining. It focuses on the surface, banalities, events, and I wanted to spend a longer time talking to people in depth, and to ask them about truly important things, like love, death, and war." This interview with Svetlana Alexievich at The Nation is fantastic. Check out our own profile/interview with Alexievich from earlier this summer.
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