“Like moss, my family grew on a mountain. In the utmost northwest of Spain, they set down roots so thick that only despair could rip them out.” Lorena Piñeiro writes at Midnight Breakfast about her family and penance. Pair with a piece on the business of nonfiction.
Like Moss
LMAOR
Andy Borowitz (of The Borowitz Report) picks five novels “that are enough to make anyone laugh.”
“What’s old doesn’t need to be old-fashioned.”
One of the last places I ever expected to find John Jeremiah Sullivan’s writing is on Medium, but then again, some the last subjects I ever expected John Jeremiah Sullivan to write about are jam, jars, and pickles.
Fantastisch
In 1980, Julio Cortázar gave a series of lectures at Berkeley, which you can now read in the slim, simply-titled volume Literature Class. Among the highlights? This sentence: “I had lived with a complete feeling of familiarity with the fantastic because it seemed as acceptable to me, as possible and as real, as the fact of eating soup at eight o’clock in the evening.”
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R. L. Stine Revisited
Eat Cheese and Die Happy!: an R. L. Stine title for my life. See more at McSweeney’s by Amanda Rosenberg.
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Bits
Millions reader Lisa found Booker winner Line of Beauty to be “a more intellectualized, less satirical version of Stephen Fry’s The Liar.” I’m sure Lisa won’t mind if you borrow that line at the next cocktail party.The new Gabriel Garcia Marquez book (Memories of My Melancholy Whores, they’re calling it now) continues to generate headlines. This time Gabo foils the pirates. Go Gabo!At Amazon you can watch Jon Stewart make an ISBN joke whilst hawking his book America. Just click on the link and then check out the “Amazon.com Exclusives.”Spotted on the El: Truman Capote’s “unfinished novel” Answered Prayers.
Judy Blume on Tumblr
Judy Blume answered questions about life, writing, and her new book, In the Unlikely Event, on Alfred A. Knopf’s Tumblr on Wednesday. In case you haven’t checked it out, The Millions has a Tumblr, too.
Now Those Are Some Good Ribs
The By the Book series at the Times has produced some pretty great entries, but we have a feeling that Colson Whitehead may go down as its best interviewee. Why do we say this? Well, it might have something to do with his weeping fit in a Chelsea Dallas BBQ, prompted by an early scene in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
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