Recommended Listening: Sandra Cisneros on moving into her first apartment and finding a room of her own.
A Room of Her Own
Borders Leftovers
At The Daily Beast, our own Bill Morris goes to a Borders store closing due to bankruptcy to see what remains once all the good books have been picked clean.
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Life in Letters
“To age is to understand that the powers of total recovery are gone, are no longer anticipated (except by those who, having lost their marbles, no longer know what to anticipate).” The epistolary legacy of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, and Elizabeth Bishop offers invaluable insight into the process of growing older, writes Robert Fay for The Atlantic. See also our own Lydia Kiesling on the narrative possibilities of leaked emails.
“The muscle that helps you ignore people with bad advice”
“The greatest mistake the American writer ever made was asking everybody else what they thought of their writing. Look around your current writing workshop. Look right and left. Most of those people will stop writing. Because it’s too hard, they have no ideas, no one understands them, whatever. A few of those failed people will become editors. These are the only people in the room who should ever really matter to you.”
Praise for Emily St. John Mandel’s The Singer’s Gun
The Los Angeles Times loves Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel The Singer’s Gun.
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After the Storm, a Novel
“What stereotypes will they critique, destroy, or create? What, in other words, will the post-earthquake novel reveal about Haiti’s most recent losses, obstacles, and hopes for the future?” Patti Marxsen on the post-earthquake Haitian novel, over at The Critical Flame.
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