Octavia Butler did everything she set herself to do in this ambitious to-do list—courtesy of the Butler Archive at the Huntington Library in San Marino.
Ready, Set, Goals
Fug Life
For those who like their celebrity fashion with a voluptuous lashing of satire, this Fug’s for you. Check out the maybe-not-so-pretty fashion blog Go Fug Yourself‘s Grammy Awards coverage–or lack of coverage, as was (quelle suprise!) the case with Britney Spears.
Short Stories for Sale
Down On Cannery Row
“I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all — the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness. I shall try to demonstrate to them how these doubles are inseparable — how neither can exist without the other and how out of their groupings creativeness is born.” John Steinbeck, American literary titan and author of The Grapes of Wrath, certainly knew a thing or two about creativity.
●
●
Weltsday
Here’s a Rob MacDonald poem about a spelling bee contestant struggling with the word weltschmerz to get you through your Wednesday.
The New Vintage
Is hardcover the new vinyl? Over at The Literary Hub, Yahdon Israel argues for the irreplaceable magic of tactility and print books: “There’s something gratifying about being able to underline a sentence or write a response in the margin of a book, knowing with certainty that it will be there later. I can’t get that guarantee from a phone. My data could be hacked, a new upgrade could wipe its memory, my battery could die mid-sentence and cause me to lose everything I’ve typed. They say that what goes up into the Cloud must come down, but ‘they’ can’t always be trusted—least of all with the things I value most, my books.”
●
●
You Think It, She’ll Write It
“They are both popular and literary and seem to have no problem standing with a foot in each category.” For The Paris Review, our own Adam O’Fallon Price writes about the “unambiguous sophistication” of Curtis Sittenfeld‘s writing—which is often regulated to the world of “chick lit”—and her new short story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It. (Read our interview with Sittenfeld.)
Pulp Saint
From The Atlantic comes the case for canonizing G.K. Chesterton, the “Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist.”
●
●
John Sayles’s “Amigo” to Premiere in NYC August 10
The new film by master indie director John Sayles, Amigo, will premiere in New York on August 10th as the opening night presentation of the Asian American International Film Festival. Tickets just went on sale here; Sayles will be appearing in-person for a Q&A. “Amigo” is Sayles’s 17th feature film and a kind of historical companion piece to his recently released epic novel, A Moment in the Sun, published by McSweeney’s.
●
●