Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased, writes on shame and queer identity. “Shame would give me the power to submit to almost anything.”
Shame and Queerness
Philip Roth Disses Fiction
Philip Roth, one of America’s most distiguished and prolific novelists, tells the Financial Times that he no longer reads fiction. Why not? “I don’t know,” he says. “I wised up.”
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From Well-Read to Well-Written
Well-Read Black Girl, a Brooklyn-based book club and online community celebrating “the uniqueness of Black literature & sisterhood,” has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund its inaugural writers’ conference and festival. Past WRBG book club guests include Year in Reading alums Jacqueline Woodson and Angela Flournoy, whom we also interviewed about her debut novel The Turner House.
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Whoreallyknows?
“There are two extreme views about punctuation … the first is that you don’t actually need it because it’s perfectly possible to write down what you want to say without any punctuation marks or capital letters and people can still read it youdontevenneedspacesbetweenwordsreally. The second view is that punctuation is essential, not only to avoid ambiguity but also because it ‘shows our identity as educated people.’” Here is Adrienne Raphel from The New Yorker with a history of punctuation in the internet age.
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Novelist of ideas
Millions contributor Charles Finch writes about Norman Rush, author of Mortals and Mating, “There is the constant possibility that the next sentence is about to tell us something new.” Pair with our own review.
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Reasons to Read the Classics
In 1968 Italo Calvino published 14 reasons why we should read the classics, and his list still feels relevant. Pair with the Millions’s essay on, well, reading the classics.
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George Plimpton’s Video Falconry
A video game for the weekend: George Plimpton’s Video Falconry. Backstory. via @youngamerican
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Public Solitude
“You can’t be worrying how you sound. You can’t wonder whether you or your characters are likable or smart or interesting. You have to be inside the scene—the tactile world of tables and chairs and sunlight—attending to your characters, people who exist for you in nonvirtual reality.” Paris Review editor Lorin Stein writes for The New York Times about solitude in the age of the Internet and the future of the book.
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