The New York Times Book Review commissioned a work of fiction about the election from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She chose to write about Melania Trump. If you can handle more Trump, check out Greg Chase’s portrait of a Trump supporter, based on Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury.
The Arrangements
When A Critic Becomes An Author
Vanity Fair talks to renowned book critic Michiko Kakutani about her debut The Death of Truth and why she decided to become an author.
What’s In a Name?
The practice of naming children after a dead sibling was surprisingly common up until the late-nineteenth century–Salvador Dali, Ludwig Van Beethoven, and Vincent Van Gogh were each “necroynms,” or the second of their name. Jeannie Vasco’s essay for The Believer on necronyms and grief is perfect to read alongside this essay for The Millions by Chloe Benjamin on naming not humans, but novels.
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Beginner’s Luck
“Our great poet forever has one foot on Mount Parnassus and the other in the rue Quincampoix,” the Wall Street of eighteenth-century Paris. On how Voltaire outsmarted one of the earliest lotteries and made a fortune. Also check out how Goethe became an amateur auction theorist.
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I Can Haz Illuminated Manuscripts?
Cats and the Internet, cats and the codex: a match made in history.
Justin Cronin on Writing “The Passage”
The Passage author Justin Cronin answers questions for Salon's Reading Club: “For many years ... I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.”
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Can’t think of a bigger waste of time/talent. I don’t mean this as a political statement – same thing would apply to Hill-fic – only that this sort of thing is utterly ephemeral and disposable. The absolute worst kind of writing is assigned writing. The prose here is beyond limp, it’s just sad.
I enjoyed reading it.