Year in Reading alum Angela Flournoy writes about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for the National Book Foundation. “I return to Invisible Man often because it accomplishes so many things at once, but never at the sake of intelligent, moving storytelling.” Pair with our interview with Flournoy.
Flournoy on Ellison
Toni Morrison’s Momentous Editorial Career
Arielle Gray reflects on the lasting legacy of Toni Morrison's role as an editor and how she ushered in a generation of writers during her 19-year career at Random House
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A Writer at Heart
“Vivian Lee is the kind of editor you want on your team: a writer at heart who understands the sometimes painful creative process, a fierce advocate when it comes to supporting her authors, and always at the ready with a hilarious tweet up her sleeve.” Check out an interview with Lee at The Rumpus. You could also read a piece in which a few editors share their experiences with their first acquisitions.
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Airy Fairy
Anyone who’s majored in the humanities has likely heard warnings that it’s better to major in the sciences. If, as many would have it, we live in a scientist’s world, what place is there for the arts? At the Ploughshares blog, Cathe Shubert finds a place for writers in a STEM-obsessed society. You could also read Cathy Day on the job prospects of writers.
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A Swiftly Tilting Biography
“The contradictions of [Madeleine] L’Engle’s life offer the best insights into the complicated acrobatics we perform in the modern world in order to satisfy the competing claims of love, family, success, and ambition….While the person that emerges could be tiresome, didactic, and just plain weird—why is everyone always breaking into a hymn at her house?—she could also be tender and offered real insights into the difficulties of growing up.” There’s a new biography of the A Wrinkle In Time author out, and The New Republic examines her life’s many complexities and, well, wrinkles.
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Biography: The Story of Our Times
“There is one rule [to writing biography] that all who try their hand at it come to know: until the protagonist reveals his or her character—his or her inner self—what the biographer produces is less a life than a report, an autopsy rather than the record of a séance.” David Levering Lewis writes for The American Scholar about biography and writing “the lives of African-American figures, and [finding] in them the story of our times.”
A Forgotten Classic of the Harlem Renaissance
Almost 90 years after it was written, Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay is getting a chance to reach wider audiences thanks to Penguin Classics.
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