“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
Next Up, the Auckland Teal
As part of their ongoing efforts to monopolize all kinds of waterfowl, the good folks at Penguin, headed by the editor Jonathan Bell, have dug up old covers from the company’s defunct imprint, Pelican. The Guardian set up a slideshow that lets you scroll through a selection.
Schmidle’s Challenge
Nicholas Schmidle‘s riveting account of Seal Team Six’s Abbottabad raid was the highlight of this week‘s New Yorker. Yet he wrote the article without interviewing any of the team members. C. Christine Fair explains how he did it.
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The “Bad” Author Myth
On the heels of a New Mexico school district banning Neverwhere because a mother considered it “R-rated,” Neil Gaiman delivered a lecture for the Reading Agency about the importance of libraries and reading for children. “It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different,” he said about banning books.
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Every Word of The Great Gatsby…On Stage
In this week’s New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes about the 8-hour staging of the full text of The Great Gatsby – “Gatz” – at the Public Theater. She and actor Scott Shepherd discuss it on a podcast.
The Millions Needs Your Votes!
Voting in the 3 Quarks Daily 2010 Arts & Literature Prize is about to come to an end, so this is your last chance to click over and vote for your favorite Millions essay to win the prize. Pick your favorite and place your vote.
The NYRB Mantle
The question of who will take over The New York Review of Books when Robert Silvers passes the torch is a good one. Surely it’s one of the most desirable jobs in all of publishing.
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Gun Wizard
What do you call a genre that mixes westerns and fantasy novels? Damien Walter proposes the term “weird western.” In The Guardian, he runs down the history of the hybrid category, citing Joe Abercrombie’s Red Country and Molly Tanzer’s Vermillion as examples. Pair with Daniel Kalder on the Euro-Western.
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