At WBUR’s Modern Love podcast, actress Alysia Reiner (Orange Is The New Black, How To Get Away With Murder) reads author Laura Munson’s essay “Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear” from her memoir This Is Not The Story You Think It Is.
Fighting Words
Embracing the Mysteries in Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby Books
Adrienne Raphel looks back at Beverly Cleary's beloved Ramona Quimby series, and notes that the books are riddled with odd discrepancies that are both puzzling and charming.
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“A man who kept to himself”
Recommended reading: one essay on George Orwell‘s stomping grounds on the Scottish island where he wrote 1984 in the throes of a tubercular fever, and another on the tiny Indian town of Motihari where he was born.
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Believe Me
There’s a certain narrative voice with an unspoken aim to exonerate the speaker from wrongdoing. It occurs in novels, though it’s most common in monologues, especially those which take up the entirety of a play. At Bookforum, Lurid and Cute author Adam Thirlwell lists a number of examples, including Hunger by Knut Hamsun and Wars I Have Seen by Gertrude Stein.
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Tweeting for Posterity
You too can be in the Library of Congress. O’Reilly Radar checks in on the LoC’s efforts to build a Twitter archive.
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“An exile among exiles”
82-year-old Cuban poet Lorenzo Garcia Vega reflects upon his years of exile in the Latin American Herald Tribune.
Love and Memory
Recommended Reading: This fantastic essay by Lea Page at The Rumpus on memory, family, and a whole lot more than that: “There could be no argument, no defense. It was, in a literal sense, true. I had said that.Sure, she had left out a significant portion of the truth, but in doing so, she had revealed another. That was the one memory my mother cleaved to. That was the song she chose to sing of me. I was still losing at memory.”