Recommended Reading: Sadie Stein on a teen reading Sartre.
Against the Machine
DeWitt Talks Lightning Rods
Recommended Weekend Podcast: Helen DeWitt talks with Anne Strainchamps about her novel Lightning Rods, which we at The Millions loved a lot.
Literary Rivalries Revisited
Lulah Ellender reflects on literary rivalries throughout history, including Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, and more.
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Jack Gilbert Dies at the Age of 87
Jack Gilbert died yesterday at the age of 87. Gilbert was the author of five standalone poetry collections—as well as additional collected volumes such as last March’s Collected Poems—and he was also a past winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award. For The LA Times, John Penner reviews the poet’s legacy. Or, perhaps as fitting tribute to Gilbert’s life and work, better to hear his own final lines to the poem “Failing and Flying”: “I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, / but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
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As Good as Gold
Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient won the Golden Man Booker Prize, the one-off award celebrating the best work of fiction from the last five decades of the prize. About the prize, Ondaatje said “I wish in fact that those of us on this Man Booker list had been invited to propose and speak about what we felt were the overlooked classics—in order to enlarge what ought to be read, as opposed to relying on the usual suspects.” Read the rest of his illuminating and gracious speech over at Literary Hub.
Jason Reynolds on the Language of Discussing Racism with Kids
Jason Reynolds discusses the goal behind writing a nuanced book on racism for children with Ibram X. Kendi.
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Stories Are Clumsy Beasts
Over at ZYZZYVA, Christian Kiefer talks to playwright Octavio Solis and novelist Scott Hutchins about the craft of writing and the difference between writing plays and writing novels. “It takes a huge amount of hard labor, man, to harness the forces that we are using to make our stories. They may emerge whole cloth out of our need to know how we operate as humans, but they’re often clumsy unfinished beasts.” Kiefer’s new novel, The Animals, is one of the most anticipated books of 2015.
Hello Byliner
Byliner, a sleek new site that features narrative non-fiction from around the web (and for the most part from the usual suspects, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, et al.) has launched. The Nieman Journalism Lab covers the launch.
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