“Storytelling, she added, is a central part of Native American life, and, inevitably an obsessive part of hers. ‘It’s probably the most selfish thing I do,’ she said. ‘Truly. I don’t do it for anyone else. I do it because I have the addict’s need to get lost in the story.’” Louise Erdrich discusses her new novel LaRose.
Storytelling Addict
A Foreign Body within Oneself
Over at the Masters Review, Marjorie Sandor writes about the uncanny in literature and film, the origins of the word, and psychology. “Uncanny. Look it up in a standard collegiate dictionary, and you’ll get a brief, unhelpful definition. Seemingly supernatural. Mysterious. [orig. Sc & N. Engl.]. But the slippage has already begun. Seemingly.”
Sidney Lumet Dies at 86
Sidney Lumet, director of 12 Angry Men, Serpico, and many other classic films, has died at 86.
Writing Catholic
Over at the New Republic Year in Reading alum William Giraldi writes his “Confessions of a Catholic Novelist,” and they include ruminations on Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy, as well as on the inevitable impact being raised in the Church has on his own work and the writing of many, many others. Giraldi’s essay pairs very well with the work of our own Nick Ripatrazone, who has reviewed Giraldi’s Hold the Dark, written about teaching Flannery O’Connor to high school students, and just this week discussed the current state of independent Catholic literature.
●
●
Pickwick Posts
Joshua Cohen, author of the recently published Book of Numbers, will begin writing a serialized, twentieth-century version of Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers live and online next week. Beginning October 12 at 1pm, viewers can watch Cohen spend five days reimagining the book and will be able to offer criticism that may affect the ending.
●
●
Believing in the Bookternet
Recommended Viewing: Year in Reading alumna Rachel Fershleiser’s TED talk “Why I heart the Bookternet” on building reading communities through the internet. “The more tools that we get for communication and collaboration, the more we’re taking reading and writing — these really solitary pursuits — and building communities around them for connection and conversation.”
Alice Munro’s First Book
“I didn’t really understand what reading was for. If I wanted a story, the thing to do was to get my grandmother to read it to me. Then listening to her voice, her story-reading voice which always sounded a little incredulous, marvelling, yet full of faith, bravely insistent, and watching her face, its meaningful and utterly familiar expressions—lifted eyebrows, ominously sinking chin, brisk little nods of agreement when, as sometimes happened, a character said something sensible—then I would feel the story grow into life and exist by itself, so that it hardly seemed to me that she was reading it out of a book at all; it was something she had created herself, out of thin air… But one summer I had the whooping-cough, and afterwards I could not go swimming or jump off the beams in the barn or boss my little brother, because by that time he had the whooping-cough himself. My grandmother was off somewhere, visiting other cousins. So I swung on my swing until I got dizzy, and then for no reason in particular I took the Child’s History out of the bookcase in the front room, and sat down on the floor and started to read.” Alice Munro writes about A Child’s History of England, the first book she ever read.
●
●