Recommended Perusing: This list from Electric Literature of six contemporary innovators of the short story. From Lorrie Moore to Alejandro Zambra, it is some seriously good company.
Sanity Is a Construct
Great to Not Great
At HTML Giant, Jimmy Chen plots famous writers on two axes: Genius to Mediocrity and Arrogance to Modesty. It may offend you (or leave you feeling satisfied) to know that Tom Wolfe is the plot’s most arrogant author.
●
●
Just Stop There
What do Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Year in Reading alumna Margaret Atwood have in common? They’re all great writers — and they all had only one kid.
Louise Erdrich: The Paris Review Interview
“By having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer… Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I’ve made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor.” The Paris Review interviews Louise Erdrich for its Winter issue.
Hipster Sommelier
Might I suggest a Pamplemousse with that Ben Fountain, sir? BookRiot has very helpfully compiled a list of La Croix/book pairings. See also: this in memoriam for Michael Jackson, beer connoisseur. Yeah no, not the one you’re thinking of.
●
●
Manic Paranoid Torpor
“Soldiers eat beef teriyaki and chicken cavatelli M.R.E.s in a war zone where ‘armored ruins’ line the roads, ‘charred corpses scattered in among the blasted metal’; and sniper fire and I.E.D. ambushes are a constant threat: ‘the chaos out there, the crazy Arabic writing and abu-jabba jabber, the lawless traffic, the hidden danger and buzz and stray bullets and death looming from every overpass.'” Michiko Kakutani reviews Roy Scranton’s War Porn for The New York Times. Here’s an old review from The Millions that shares a bit of Scranton’s lingering sentiment regarding the war.
Granta Redux
This week, Granta redesigned its website, which now boasts a spiffy black-and-white aesthetic. If you’re looking for an excuse to check it out, you could do worse than reading Year in Reading alum Hari Kunzru’s “Drone,” a story which appears in their India issue. (They’re also highlighting great pieces from their archives, among them the story “Night” by Alice Munro.)
On The (Separate) Road
“I always had the sneaking and sinking suspicion that there would have been no place for me … there were no Scarlett O’Haras in the Beat world. There were women, certainly, but they felt like cardboard cut-outs, something to move around, admire, shift gently out of the way when necessary. In fact, the only women Kerouac and Ginsberg seemed to genuinely respect were their mothers.” Lynette Lounsbury at The Guardian on falling in love with the Beat generation, which may or may not have loved her back.
●
●