“The things I do not want to write about become the things I write about.” Year in Reading alumnus Eimear McBride talks to The Guardian on the occasion of her second novel’s arrival. The Lesser Bohemians follows upon her hugely successful debut, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, which we reviewed back when it came out in the U.S.
A Girl Is a Fully-Formed Thing
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.
●
●
Harvard University Press’s Redistribution of Wealth
Flushed with cash after the runaway success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the Harvard University Press has decided to offer a 20% discount off two dozen works on capitalism and its discontents. Get to it while the gettin’s good.
The Bolshoi is Back
If consecutive profiles in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books are any indication, the reopening of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre is a very big deal. To celebrate from the comfort of your chair, however, you can listen to the overture from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky‘s opera The Voyevoda, which opened in the Bolshoi in 1869.
●
●
Choose Your Own Epiphany
With the help of the folks at Ploughshares and Medium, Year in Reading alumna Megan Mayhew Bergman is publishing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure literary short story. To participate, read the first chapter (as well as the introduction) online, then tweet Bergman to tell her where the story should go from there.
Nabokov Pitches Hitchcock
Remember that time Vladimir Nabokov pitched Alfred Hitchcock a melodramatic love story about a girl and an astronaut? No? Read all about it.
●
●
Kanye West, Philosopher + Author
Kanye West is back on Twitter. And in literary news, he’s decided to write a philosophy book, Break the Simulation and publish excerpts (or maybe the entire thing) on Twitter. There appears to be no release date or publisher attached so stay tuned.