Too Male
Write This Down
"Does handwriting matter?" That's the question some researchers are working to answer and that Maria Konnikova tackles in a piece for The New York Times. The article ends by suggesting that “with handwriting, the very act of putting it down forces you to focus on what’s important... maybe it helps you think better," which is doubtlessly encouraging to every writer who works on their drafts in longhand.
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A state of shock.
When a professor of literature wrote Flannery O'Connor for a master key for interpreting her story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," he probably did not expect her particularly unimpressed reply: "Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it." (Via the ever-excellent Letters of Note.)
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Two-Step
You may have heard that War of the Encyclopaedists is one of those rare novels written by multiple authors. Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite worked together to write their debut. In The Guardian, our own Emily St. John Mandel takes a look.
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The Story Writer and His Writer Friend
Beautiful Ruins author (and Year in Reading favorite) Jess Walter describes “the genesis of a story.”
The James Salter Diet
James Salter’s women are “described over and over again as meals for the male protagonists to enjoy and then leave behind in various western European countries,” Lidia Jean Kott argues. Read Sonya Chung’s take in our review of All That Is.
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A Thing of Beauty
"Hitler increasingly presented himself in messianic terms, promising 'to lead Germany to a new era of national greatness,' though he was typically vague about his actual plans." The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani writes a review of Volker Ullrich's new Hitler biography, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939, so timely it could easily be an op-ed. Just read it. And when you're done, read this too.