Recommended Reading: John Williams suggests some reads as we prepare for the presidential primaries.
Elections and All
Writer-Collector
“I do not find it unusual that many writers I know acquire vintage clothes, buy old homes, and rescue animals. For one, we don’t have Wall Street salaries, and secondly, we’re suckers for backstory, particularly that which is left to the imagination. Our job, after all, is to make up lives, engage in epic games of pretend.” Megan Mayhew Bergman writes for Ploughshares about collecting cast-off objects, “the chaos of memories,” and becoming a writer. Pair with David L. Ulin‘s reflection on Bergman’s essay and the way we think about memory, written for the LA Times.
Money, not ethics, ultimately motivates censorship
Ariel Bogle has a good round up over on Moby Lives about Paypal, Amazon, Apple, and censorship in publishing.
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Death of a Reader
Now that Google Reader is nearing its official death, the people who used to depend on it are waxing nostalgic about its heyday. At Page-Turner, Joshua Rothman remembers the feeds he once relied on.
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“The Specter of the Confessional”
“The specter of the confessional haunts all first-person writing, and women’s writing in particular,” but perhaps “the instinct to insert [the self] comes from a place of saying, ‘I’m not an expert, I’m just a person; let me show you where I’m situated here in this thing I’m telling you about.'” Our own Lydia Kiesling writes about Meghan Daum, Lena Dunham, Leslie Jamison and the confessional impulse in nonfiction for Salon.
Tuesday New Release Day: Carey, Mieville, Murakami
New today are Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears and China Mieville’s Railsea. And Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is now out in a snazzy three-volume boxed-set paperback edition.
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Plus He Took a Selfie
We’re not the only ones looking back on favorite pieces of the year. At The Paris Review Daily, a Gchat (yes, Gchat) with George Saunders, who corresponded with Katherine Bernard on Valentine’s Day.
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