For The Guardian, Richard Lea investigates the fine line between fiction and nonfiction writing, a boundary that is drawn most firmly in the anglophone world. Pair with this Millions piece in defense of blurring the lines of fiction and autobiography.
The Made-up Divide
A 20 Year Overnight Success
Joe Fassler interviews recent MacArthur Genius and Year-in-Reading alum Viet Thanh Nguyen on the myth of overnight success, balancing an academic career while still finding time to write novels and the sacrifices all writers must make. Over at Electric Literature.
13 Reasons Why Not
“It would be hard for anybody who has dealt with suicide to not have a heightened awareness of things, to perhaps be a little more cautious about things.” A Colorado school district has officially pulled the book 13 Reasons Why out of circulation, reports The New York Post; not surprisingly, some librarians are rankled. Pair with this case against book banning, which focuses on number 15 on the list of 100 most challenged books released by the ALA, Toni Morrison‘s The Bluest Eye.
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Tangled Youths
Evan Hughes investigates the formulation of such writers as Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, and David Foster Wallace. He claims they and their generation “had youths tangled enough for ten novels.”
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.literature
Amazon’s attempts to control literary domain names like “.book” and “.read” are not making the publishing community happy.
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Red Scare
“Marx the anti-Communist is an unfamiliar figure; but there were undoubtedly times when he shared the view of the liberals of his day and later, in which communism (assuming anything like it could be achieved) would be detrimental to human progress.” Wait, what? The New York Review of Books reviews Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life.
“One story shook the Soviet Union.”
Writing for the BBC, Steve Rosenberg looks at the lasting impact and significance of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was published fifty years ago this month.
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