BuzzFeed has launched READER, a new home for literary writing, featuring an essay by Melissa Broder, poetry by Jericho Brown, and a short story from Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours.
Reading Material
Parting Is Blah Blah Blah
Say goodbye to Sadie Stein! Stein, who is moving on after two years as The Paris Review Daily’s correspondent, had this to say: “It is a strange thing to monetize your emotions. Anyone who writes or creates knows this. And the work one does on the Internet feels insubstantial, even by the flimsy standards of intellectual property. Any body of digital work is a funny mixture of ephemeral and immortal, and it’s hard to know how to feel about such an archive.”
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An Inquiring Mind
“I say peel back the immediate surface layer and let’s see what’s actually underneath, if it’s possible to find that out. As a child, of course, I grew up looking under dead logs to see if there might be a newt. Most of the time there wasn’t a newt. Sometimes there was.” Margaret Atwood talks newts and skepticism in a new interview over at Hazlitt. Atwood’s newest, The Heart Goes Last, is out now.
Yiyun Li on Reporting Fiction
When describing the process of writing her latest book, Yiyun Li sees herself as more of an impartial reporter than a novelist.
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Two Feet Bad
“Children have a keen sense of injustice, and this was the thing that upset me the most: the pigs were so unjust.” Margaret Atwood recalls an early love of George Orwell.
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Happy Birthday, Baldwin
Yesterday was James Baldwin’s birthday. Revisit “Stranger in the Village” or Justin Campbell’s essay on fatherhood and Baldwin in celebration of his life.
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