“It came to me while picking beans, the secret of happiness.” Maria Popova from Brain Pickings on gardening and what it means to be happy. Writers used to be so mopey and alcoholic all the time–it’s nice that they can just be happy now.
The Pursuit of Happiness
Tuesday New Release Day: Sorokin, Perec, O’Nan
Out this week is Russian author Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik. Coinciding with that release, NYRB Classics is putting out Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy. Georges Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is now on shelves, as is Stewart O’Nan’s Emily, Alone, in which he revisits the Maxwell family from his 2002 book Wish You Were Here.
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Remembering Mankell
Recommended Reading: This Atlantic article on the life of Henning Mankell, author of the Kurt Wallander series. The author said, “When I write, I always try to reflect the reality we live in, a reality that is becoming rougher and more violent. This violence and its impact on people around it is what I try to reflect in Wallander. But reality always surpasses the poem.”
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Much Ado about Journalism and Fact-Checking
Chris Rose laments the erosion of his former employer, New Orleans’s Times-Picayune, in the pages of Oxford American’s New South Journalism issue. Meanwhile, James Pogue discusses the art of fact-checking, which he says “has recently become a voguish topic among the New Yorker-reading and NPR-listening set.” This is of course to say nothing of the London Review of Books-reading set across the pond as well, much less the Onion-reading set located far and wide.
Abstract
Up until 1999, Italian college students were required to write longform theses, which explains why Umberto Eco felt the need to write a guide to completing one. Eco being Eco, however, the guide went on to become a classic with many applications. At Page-Turner, Hua Hsu explains why the author’s writing manual is also a guide to life. You could also read Hillary Kelly on Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist.
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Declan Meade and Ireland’s Stinging Fly
Eileen Battersby profiled Declan Meade, the publisher, editor, and co-founder of Ireland’s Stinging Fly literary journal. The magazine, which just published its 43rd issue, has been credited with popularizing some of Ireland’s most significant contemporary writers.
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