“By casting my book as personal rather than professional—by marketing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery, rather than a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment—I was effectively being stripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best.” Suki Kim on writing a work of investigative journalism that was miscategorized as memoir. Pair with this Millions piece in defense of memoirs.
Mind the Label
Elliott Holt Talks Anton Chekhov
“On the surface ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ is a love story,” writes Elliott Holt in a blog post for The Missouri Review. “[It’s] a romantic one at that, but it’s also about the tension between the person we show the world and the one we keep to ourselves. The older I get, the more the story resonates with me.”
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No Exit
As Der Spiegel bluntly puts it, when Jean-Paul Sartre met up with the head of the RAF, a German terrorist group, he tried to use his powers “to persuade them to stop murdering people.”
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New Eggers Story
Today's second dose of recommended reading: Dave Eggers has a new short story, "The Alaska of Giants and Gods," in The New Yorker.
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Sky Dive From Your Desk
Betty Wants In and the Melbourne Skydive Centre have been churning out some simply amazing footage of sky divers, parachutists, and base jumpers. Check out their latest installment, Experience Freedom, and be blown away. (Previously: Experience Human Flight, Experience Zero Gravity.)
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There Now
It's fitting in a strange way that the author of Being There is now the subject of an oddball novel-turned-biography. In the Times, Benjamin Markovits reads Jerome Charyn's book Jerzy, which gives the life of Jerzy Kosinski a treatment he'd likely appreciate.
New Novel from David Mitchell
David Mitchell fans, good news! The author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas will publish a new novel called Slade House this coming October. Even better? It's based on his short-story-via-Twitter, "The Right Sort," which The Millions first collected and published.
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