Max Porter’s Death Is the Thing With Feathers is a bizarre, beautiful book. Over at The Literary Hub, he talks death, writing, and musical theater with Catherine Lacey. Porter’s book came highly recommended by Garth Risk Hallberg in his 2015 Year in Reading for The Millions.
On Death and Crows
Yiyun Li on Reporting Fiction
When describing the process of writing her latest book, Yiyun Li sees herself as more of an impartial reporter than a novelist.
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“We need a theory of jerks.”
“Everywhere you turn, are you surrounded by fools, by boring nonentities, by faceless masses and foes and suckers and, indeed, jerks?” If so–as this insightful if somewhat confidence-shattering piece at Aeon suggests–the jerk may be you.
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Alias Atwood
Following on the success of Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, Netflix teases a first trailer for its take on Alias Grace. Read our review of the former here.
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Reject Yourself!
The first time’s always the hardest, right? Well, what if you could dull the pain of future rejection letters by preempting your favorite publication’s editors? That’s right. Now you can reject yourself with the Rejection Generator. And just to show that we’re not taking sides on this issue, check out some of the utter dross agents and editors get offered on a daily basis.
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Scathing ‘New York Times’ Book Reviews
Read some of the harshest New York Times book reviews on literary classics, including Lolita, Ulysses, and The Catcher in the Rye.
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Gastronomy
It’s not hard to find studies of the connection between creativity and alcohol. It’s a connection which great minds have remarked upon for centuries. But what’s less remarked upon is a more everyday relationship — the connection between great writing and food. In The New York Review of Books, Patricia Storace reads Sandra M. Gilbert’s The Culinary Imagination. (Related: Stephanie Bernhard tries out Hemingway’s recipes.)
The Men Who Stare at Goats
What would the child of The Big Lebowski characters The Dude (Jeff Bridges) and Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) look like? Maybe like Lt. Col. Django (Bridges, again), one of the characters in Grant Heslov‘s The Men Who Stare at Goats, set to release in November, a comedy about the U.S. military’s attempt to train psychic soldiers (based on the book by Jon Ronson).
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