Jenn Shapland had the pleasure of cataloguing the archives of Carson McCullers, Gertrude Stein, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Their possessions left her with a few lingering questions. Pair with Shapland’s piece on cataloguing David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.
Questions from the Archives
Cat’s TV
This week in book-to-film adaptation news: Kurt Vonnegut‘s Cat’s Cradle is slated to become a TV show, “which will hopefully be long enough to fill an entire week’s worth of classes” for any desperate English teachers out there.
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Revisiting Márquez’s Speech
In December 1982, Gabriel García Márquez accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you haven’t read or heard his acceptance speech, you can now at Brain Pickings. We have a few pieces about the iconic author to pair with it.
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Dead Men May Tell Tales
“The eradication of Terry Pratchett’s unfinished works, the zeros and ones of his hard drive ground into the earth at the Great Dorset Steam Fair, is an imaginative exception to the rule.” The Paris Review questions how we publish an authors posthumous works and whether there’s a better way to do so. Pair with: our 2017 Select Literary Obituaries.
The Thrill of Writing Prose
Bookforum interviewed Garth Greenwell about the queer tradition of autofiction, the impulse to write fiction, and the thrill of surprising oneself. Also check out this Millions review of Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs to You.
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Early Chaucer Manuscript Put Online for All to See
The “Hengwrt Chaucher,” one of the most significant early manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, has been put online for the entire world to see thanks to the efforts of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.
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In the Confessional
A harrowing interview with How to Sell author Clancy Martin is up at the Torpedo blog.