Over at The Paris Review, Wei Tchou travels to Flannery O’Connor’s farm in Georgia. As she writes, “The charm of Andalusia lies in gestures like this, the ones that urge you into feeling as though you belong. The place isn’t a fossil, it’s a home.” Pair with Nick Rapatrazone’s Millions essay on teaching and learning from “the greatest American writer ever to load up a typewriter.”
Flannery’s Home
On Race and Rankine
Recommended reading: Nick Laird writes about Claudia Rankine‘s National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Citizen: An American Lyric and “A New Way of Writing About Race” for the New York Review of Books.
“Female Essayists Seize the Day”
Though major publications like The New York Times are still questioning the importance and power of female essayists, Lucy Scholes argues that women are producing “some of the best writing today” and as proof lists several of the best recent essay collections by women in a piece for The Daily Beast. Incidentally, that list includes titles such as The Empathy Exams and The Opposite of Loneliness, both of which were reviewed for The Millions (here and here, respectively).
Finding the Red Moon
ICYMI: Brad Listi interviewed Benjamin Percy as part of his Other People Podcast. Among other things, they talked about Percy’s new novel.
●
●
A Zombie Meets a Snake
Recommended Reading: Over at Harper’s, Anne Carson describes what happens when a zombie meets a snake, in her first published short story.
●
●
A Sign of the Apocalypse?
The singularity is near: If you go to your Amazon recommendations page, you’ll see that you can now log into Facebook from there “to get Amazon recommendations for you and discover your friends’ Favorites and Likes.”
●
●
Great Divides
In the nineties, when Jack Livings was teaching English in China, he was gathering material for The Dog, his short story collection that recently won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize. In an interview in the WSJ, he talks about his research process, Chinese idioms and Uighur-Han relations. You could also read Casey Walker’s syllabus for modern China. (h/t The Rumpus)
●
●
“And then later how we were terrible again”
Recommended Reading: Guernica’s excerpt from Matt Bell’s upcoming novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods.
Hemingway in Love
One of Hemingway’s friends reveals in a new memoir how the writer’s secret lover changed his life and work. Pair with Stephanie Bernhard’s Millions essay about cooking with Hemingway.