Recommended Reading: Alice Walker and Colm Tóibín discuss adaptations of their work for film and stage. Pair with our article on breaking down the Oscar for adapted screenplay.
On Adaptation
Jailhouse Rock
Can’t get enough of Orange is the New Black? Neither could The Missouri Review. Their new blog series, Literature on Lockdown, shares narratives from those who teach or write in prisons. This week’s post comes from Ace Boggess, a poet who spent five years in a West Virginia prison. “One thing about being a writer in prison is that you have not lost everything. You still have that driving need to speak whatever truth you know in whatever way you can. No one can take that away from you, not even the State.”
Things Look Up
Recommended Reading: Oliver Burkeman on a new group of optimistic thinkers.
“It is true that if there exists a ‘writer’s writer,’ [George] Saunders is the guy”
Joel Lovell profiles George Saunders for The New York Times, and he gives a killer endorsement for Saunders’s latest book, Tenth of December. The author’s collection from thirteen years ago, Pastoralia, was picked on our site as being among the “Best of the Millennium.”
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A Drawn Out Illustration
Twelve days after Gustave Flaubert died, a friend cataloged the writer’s personal effects. 48,311 days later, Joanna Neborsky illustrated them.
Artistic Solitude
“I used to run cross country in high school and it was like, I knew if I put in a certain kind of training, it was going to make me faster. If X, then Y. But with writing, it’s like, if X, if I do this thing that’s necessary, which is giving myself the space and time, then what? It’s sort of a question mark. You have no idea. You work so hard to offer yourself up to the space of the unknown.” Leslie Jamison (and Angela Flournoy and Katherine Towler) on being alone and setting aside the time to write.
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