For The Brooklyn Rail, John Ashbery answers some questions about writing in French, crushes on boys, and the presence of “it.” As he puts it, “I’m sort of notorious for my use of the pronoun ‘it’ without explaining what it means, which somehow never seemed a problem to me.”
It & Co.
No-Bull Bourbon Reviews
It’s about an hour away from 5 o’clock over here, so that gives you plenty of time to read Chris Newgent’s “No-Bull Bourbon Review” on Hobart’s website. “A true bourbon,” Newgent writes, “is a bourbon with a story worth remembering.” Agreed. And so would Walker Percy.
“I decided to stage an event: Robot Wars.”
Recommended Reading: Got a ton of spare time and a nostalgic interest in killer, mechanized war machines? Cool. Me too. Here’s an oral history of Battlebots.
The Pioneer Detectives on Kobo
Prefer to read your ebooks on a Kobo reader? Good news: the latest ebook original from The Millions, The Pioneer Detectives, is now available on Kobo.
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Fully Secure
Recommended Viewing: Atlas Obscura’s gallery of libraries in which books are chained to the shelves. (h/t The Hairpin)
Tangled Youths
Evan Hughes investigates the formulation of such writers as Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, and David Foster Wallace. He claims they and their generation "had youths tangled enough for ten novels."
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Ghosts of Novels
It's always disappointing when your novel fails to get published, but what if that novel were still lurking online? At The New York Times, Jason K. Friedman writes about finding the Amazon and Google links for his novel that never made it to print. "Google admits, 'We haven’t found any reviews in the usual places,' which in this case would be the planet Earth." Pair with: Our own Edan Lepucki's essay on how to cope with not selling your novel.
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