Recommended Reading: Over at The Offing, a new story by Joy Williams describes what happens when a sad group of American tourists goes to Cornwall, England.
Sensible Tourists
Believe Me
There’s a certain narrative voice with an unspoken aim to exonerate the speaker from wrongdoing. It occurs in novels, though it’s most common in monologues, especially those which take up the entirety of a play. At Bookforum, Lurid and Cute author Adam Thirlwell lists a number of examples, including Hunger by Knut Hamsun and Wars I Have Seen by Gertrude Stein.
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The Art of Stealing
Richard Cohen writes about plagiarizing real people’s identities and the dirty side of writing. As Milan Kundera writes in The Art of the Novel, “The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel.”
“I did most of my reading at the International House of Pancakes.”
David Sedaris chats with The New York Times about his reading habits in the first installment of their latest series, "By the Book."
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May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor
Leave the marshmallows at home, and bring your bow and arrow to summer camp instead. In Largo, Florida, the Country Day School created a camp based on The Hunger Games, where campers play intense games of capture the flag. Don't worry, killing your fellow campers isn't allowed.
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Élisabeth Gille Part Two
In a recent article on Irène Némirovsky’s daughter Élisabeth Gille, Ruth Franklin picks up where our own Emily St. John Mandel left off.
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Animals!
Today in things you might like to read about animals: Some birds, apparently, not only mourn their dead but even hold funeral services. And while it's widely known that the internet is made of cats, Wired dug a little deeper and tried to uncover the root of our collective feline fixation.
Recommended Reading: Rose McLarney
Recommended Reading: The Missouri Review's poem of the week is Rose McLarney's "Arcadia" from the fall 2013 issue. "It’s the feeling of the inquiry, 'Don’t I know you from somewhere?,' a traveler gets when she walks into a new place and still, somehow, recognizes a quality in a face, or can somehow hum a refrain in an otherwise strange song," she writes about her poetry.
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Timekeepers
Need some more Jeanette Winterson in your life? The New Statesman is here with a short story. Titled “Gnomon,” it centers on a medieval blacksmith, Stephen, who’s asked to create his town’s first mechanical clock. Sample quote: “Time is irregular. One hour is not the same length as another.”
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