At The Guardian, Jhumpa Lahiri recounts the path that led her to write her latest book in Italian, one of the most anticipated books of 2016. As she puts it, “A week after arriving [in Rome], I open my diary to describe our misadventures and I do something strange, unexpected. I write my diary in Italian. I do it almost automatically, spontaneously. I do it because when I take the pen in my hand I no longer hear English in my brain. During this period when everything confuses me, everything unsettles me, I change the language I write in.”
Language, the Savior
Edwin Frank Interview
Vince Manapat’s interview with NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank provides an interesting (if slightly erroneous) history of how the publisher got started. If you come away from the interview wondering what Mr. Frank recommends reading, then, ta-da! and look no further.
Our New Enemy
The new issue of The Enemy is out, and it’s got some goodies which may be of interest to Millions readers. Among them are two new poems by Ruth Ellen Kocher, who won the 2014 PEN Open Book prize; an appraisal of the value of bad art by sociologist Alison Gerber; and a reassessment of the MFA by Beckett Flannery.
Julia Whicker’s Song of the Exile
What to do when novel writing gets painful? Start a fashion blog.
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the looking glass of this language
This National Geographic piece on the desire to document and preserve the world’s many dying languages is great.
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Are Babies Racist?
Are critically acclaimed authors really terrible? Is feminism bad for women? New York Magazine runs down the greatest hits of what appears, in hindsight, to have been the Decade of Counterintuition (and, in the process, catalogues many of my personal bêtes noires).
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Best Arts and Lit Pieces Contest
3 Quarks Daily is running an Arts & Literature Prize to find the best blog writing in that category. Millions readers, we’d love it if you nominated some of your favorite Millions pieces from the last year for the prize.
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