What does handwriting tell us about its author? The Atlantic investigates. Our own Kevin Hartnett explains why he writes by hand.
The Pen Reveals
Everything I Say
Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt by Kristin Hersh is a downright mesmerizing elegy to the eclectic singer-songwriter. Part idiot-savant, part deliberate curmudgeon , Vic Chesnutt (who Rolling Stone has called one of the greatest songwriters of all time) was notoriously difficult to spend a lot of time around. Hersh stopped by Electric Literature for an interview about the book and about losing her dear friend Vic. Bonus: for anyone unfamiliar with Chesnutt’s work, this video will get you close.
Book ownership and education
In Salon, Laura Miller discusses two new studies showing a correlation between the number of books in a child’s household and the level of education that child’s likely to attain: “Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.”
My Dear Meat Paste
The Scottish poet Robert Burns’s “Address to a Haggis” might well be the most famous ode to a food product in the English canon. At The Paris Review Daily, Sadie Stein celebrates Burns’s birthday by reflecting on the poem, which starts off by describing haggis as the “chieftain of the pudding race.”
Ruling Her Realm
“People are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that the characters they love and regard as people, real people, were made up by someone, especially if that someone is a woman.” Cassandra Clare, the author who began by writing fanfiction and went on to pen the wildly successful The Mortal Instruments series, talks about her work with Penelope Green.
What About Your Head?
“None of us made love, we had only reproaches for one another. I hated that dependency and yet I couldn’t live without it.” This short piece by Mercè Rodoreda from the new issue of Harper’s Magazine is brutal and surprising. The piece is an excerpt from Rodoreda’s War, So Much War, out later this month.
December Stories
Recommended Reading: The fall issue of December is out, featuring works by Grace Cavalieri, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Marge Piercy, and our own Michael Bourne.
Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask
At FiveChapters this week, you can read an excerpt of Sam Lipsyte’s forthcoming novel, The Ask.
Well That Was Dramatic
Author Terry Pratchett‘s archives have been destroyed by steamroller, according to The New York Times. The hard drive containing all of his unpublished work was, per his wishes, run over by a close friend. We ran this remembrance on the occasion of his passing two years ago.