Over at Longreads, Carrie Frye writes on the homonymous short stories of Shirley Jackson and Year in Reading alumna Kelly Link. Also check out this Millions interview with Link.
The Summer People
Amy Tan on Being the First for Some Readers
Nicole Chung interviews Amy Tan about her new memoir Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, one of the highlights is when Tan ponders being one of the ‘first’ authors that people name/read when they think of Asian-American literature. “But when [“The Joy Luck Club”] came out, it did feel like there were many expectations from all areas — not just in the Asian American community, but in Asian culture itself, and in any ethnic studies community. There were people who said ‘At last!’ and there were people who said ‘How dare she?’ […] I wanted to say: I’m not writing sociology, it just so happens this is what happened in my own family.”
Imaginary Oklahoma
“Imaginary Oklahoma” is an ongoing platform at This Land Press in which “some of today’s most important and influential writers combine with artists from outside the state [of Oklahoma] to provide a fictional take on this place we call home.” New Yorker editor, author of Celebrity Chekhov, and chart enthusiast Ben Greenman has written a piece entitled “Always and Forever.”
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How to Pitch Your Addiction Memoir
A writer pitches an addiction, and a subsequent addiction memoir (working title: Running Up a Glass Hill on Roller Skates) to a publisher, at McSweeneys.
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The Widening Spell
“Ah, I think, a lizard-poet. This particular category was one I had concocted years before to describe those poets who were too Olympian to mingle with the rest of us, who stood to the side, detached, having feelings.” Remembering Larry Levis, whose book of last poems, The Darkening Trapeze, was released this past week.
Pulling Out the Stops for Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue
Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue (as seen in our Book Preview; and excerpted here) is due to hit shelves early September, and everybody seems pretty excited about it. How excited? Well, the book will come with an “enhanced e-book” replete with multimedia features, and the publishers have also decided to create a pop-up version of Brokeland Records, one of the novel’s main settings.
Dear Colon
On the heels of all this talk of colons, Emdashes solicits open letters to punctuation marks.
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