Recommended Listening: David Naimon interviews Year in Reading alumnus Brian Evenson about his A Collapse of Horses, literary horror, and philosophy.
Reporting from Collapse
Curiosities
A “blogbook” on the financial crisis. The table of contents.Essential Bolaño: The Five Most Unskippable Passages in 266650 years worth of Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” is now online for free all the way back to that very first strip. (via)
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.
An Experiment In Crowdsourced Development
Palgrave Macmillan is posting sample chapters from book proposals online, inviting comment “from anyone who feels they can contribute to the development of the works in question.” The trial will continue for the next six weeks.
Fiction Changing History
In an article for Vanity Fair, Meredith Turtis argues that “perhaps fiction… can change the place women have in history,” by giving forgotten figures new lives as characters with fascinating stories to tell. She cites Paula McClain‘s just-released Circling the Sun, about a trailblazing female aviator, and Megan Mayhew Bergman‘s Almost Famous Women, which could have been included based on the title alone. Her argument pairs well with our own Hannah Gersen‘s review of Jami Attenberg‘s Saint Mazie, a novel that fictionalizes the life and voice of a very real “Bowery celebrity.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Crummey; Beauman; Yan; Wisniewski; Kapoor; Galera; Hulse; Hooper; Greenberg; Whitehouse
Out this week: Sweetland by Michael Crummey; Glow by Ned Beauman; Frog by the Nobel laureate Mo Yan; Watch Me Go by Mark Wisniewski; A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor; Blood-Drenched Beard by Daniel Galera; Black River by S.M. Hulse; Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper; My Father’s Wives by the ESPN host Mike Greenberg; and Mobile Library by David Whitehouse. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Saundersisms
George Saunders stopped by the Dinner Party podcast to dole out advice on topics ranging from constructing poems about wolves “making love,” dealing with a friend who’s been fired, sober-drunk relations, and “man purses.”
Runways for Days
“I took my son to Paris fashion week, and all I got was a profound understanding of who he is, what he wants to do with his life, and how it feels to watch a grown man stride down a runway wearing shaggy yellow Muppet pants.” Michael Chabon writes a beautiful piece for GQ about going couturing with his son, Abraham. Pair with yesterday’s essay by R. J. Hernández on fashion in literary fiction.