Melissa Broder shares her thoughts on open marriage and illness in an excerpt from her So Sad Today. Pair with Gila Lyons’s Millions essay on writing through illness.
Illness as Metaphor
Extremely Patient and Incredibly Careful
It looks like Jonathan Safran Foer will be publishing his first novel in eleven years next fall. The book, tentatively titled Here I Am, is the story of an American Jewish family, set against a background of traumatic events in the Middle East including earthquakes and an invasion of Israel. Foer’s last novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, enjoyed tremendous critical and commercial success. Here’s a piece on JSF’s crazy, confusing, die-cut book Tree of Codes.
●
●
On Migration
Granta asks their contributors what it means to be a migrant or a refugee in light of the crisis in Europe. Twenty-eight authors respond in visual media, personal essays, and poems. You could also read our migrations book list for more perspectives.
Big Picture
The cartoonist Joe Sacco has a new graphic novel out that uses a twenty-four-foot panorama to depict the first day of the Battle of the Somme. At Salon, Sacco tells Daniel D'Addario that his upbringing in Australia, where the landings at Gallipoli have great patriotic significance, helped to spur his interest in the War to End All Wars. (Related: we interviewed Sacco last year.)
●
●
A Is for Apple
"I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees." Apples, plastic bags, teeth In The Guardian, Karl Ove Knausgaard attempts to explain the world to his unborn baby, object by object. Pair with our review of his epic, My Struggle.
Raining Poetry
Bostonians, check out this new collaboration between the city and Mass Poetry. They’ve been covering the city’s sidewalks in poetry that you can only see when it rains. If you’re visiting the city, stop at the Old Corner Bookstore for lunch, which is now a Chipotle.
●
●