Over at Granta, Melissa Febos writes about truth. As she puts it, “The true telling of our stories often requires the annihilation of other stories, the ones we build and carry through our lives because it is easier to preserve some mysteries.”
True Story
El Diablo
As part of the latest chapter of the McConnaissance, Matthew McConaughey has been tipped to star in The Stand, the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s famous novel. McConnaughey is expected to play Randall Flagg, the malevolent sorcerer and necromancer. In the words of director Josh Boone, who also directed The Fault in our Stars, the movie will be “the Godfather of post-apocalyptic thrillers.” This might be a good time to read our own Lydia Kiesling on growing up with Stephen King.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Larson, Nesbø, Brown, Earle, Udall, Marlantes
Purveyor of popular nonfiction Erik Larson has a new book out this week, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. The Snowman by Jo Nesbø is a new entry in the increasingly popular Scandinavian thriller genre. Inward-looking graphic novelist Chester Brown’s latest, Paying for It is out, and musician and actor Steve Earle can now add “novelist” to his resume with the release of I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive. And new in paperback are a pair of big books, Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist and Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn.
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Putting the Fiction in Nonfiction
While researching In Cold Blood, Truman Capote took pains to get the story right, so much so that the final product was, he claimed, “immacutely factual.” The tale of his labors is so well-known that Bennett Miller used it as the basis of his movie Capote. So when allegations surface that the author made deliberate errors, the story gets a little bit… awkward.
Maybe Now You Can Understand It.
Artist John Vernon Lord drew inspiration from Irish literature’s “books of the dark” to adapt James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into a series of illustrated images. Over at The Guardian, Lord discusses how he developed some of his pages.
There Is No End
“In the years before my book came out, I was writing frantically. I remember a week when I was working late at my job, late enough that the buses had stopped running and I had to take a cab home, and I still wrote into the night, trying to finish an essay I had promised an editor. Now I see that I was trying to race against time. I had believed, however irrationally, that there would be a moment beyond which my voice would be taken away from me and I would no longer be able to write.” On writing and tenacity.
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R.O. Kwon Takes Faith Seriously
For Lithub, R.O. Kwon talks to Maris Kreizman about book tours at colleges, losing religion, and her novel, The Incendiaries.
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