Recommended Reading: Leah Falk looks at women’s writing and unpaid labor.
What Work Is
Advice From The Hoary
“Me? He wants me to give him advice? But why? I still have no idea what I am doing. Then I realized that I did, at least, have eight more years of a writing practice that had run in tandem with a life of odd jobs, graduate school, starting a business, traveling, etc. I thought about an anecdote my friend Daniel once told me about what happened when Ian McEwan was asked to give advice to a young writer just starting out. He simply said, ‘Be successful.’” Catherine Lacey gives advice to a not-much-younger writer.
Full of Carp
Midwestern investors hope the production of domestically-farmed Asian carp can give rise to "the future Zappos of fish processing," but such optimists would be wise to safeguard their aquatic livestock against would-be carp thieves.
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Catching Mr. Harvey
Stephen Moss caught up with AD Harvey, the “independent scholar” who tricked an entire discipline into believing Charles Dickens met Fyodor Dostoevsky. (If you missed Eric Naiman’s initial piece on Harvey’s trail of deception and trickery, you’d do well to acquaint yourself now.)
Color in Poetry
Recommended reading: "What is Color in Poetry" by Dorothea Lasky for Poetry. It's a lengthy article but a thoughtful one, and, as a bonus, it includes some of Lasky's childhood poetry. Pair with our earlier post about reading teenage poetry to crowds and you've got a theme for the day.
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Capital Idea
"The Goldfinch is a grand nineteenth-century novel in that it is an 800-page chronicle of capitalism, a paean to the ways in which the world turns on the questions of who can or can’t pay for what, and how these abilities and inabilities mold us over time. Like the life events and relationships it depicts, it purports to be about love but is actually about money. This portrayal of twentieth century North American society is accurate, but also, just as in life, both exhausting and demoralizing.” On Donna Tartt’s latest novel. (You could also read Adam Dalva’s take on the book.)
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Last of the Mohicans, First of the Republicans
At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir dubs Lincoln "a tremendous accomplishment." (It probably doesn't hurt that its director is Steven Spielberg.)