“Mario purchased pickup trucks from which he removed panels and lights. The trick was packing the drugs in a part of the vehicle where the body wouldn’t lose its hollow sound when slapped.” These two sentences just got author Dan Slater‘s new book Wolf Boys banned from Texas prisons, inadvertently calling attention to Banned Books Week. Pair with two of our essays about controversial reads.
Apparently Too Real
The Perks of Being A Wallflower
“Eleven years later, the Atlantic Monthly editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, made a similar request to an obscure, retiring poet named Emily Dickinson who had written a letter asking if her verses ‘breathed.’ Her response was much like Melville’s, if typically elliptical: ‘Could you believe me—without? I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur—and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves—Would this do just as well?'” The age-old problem: how writers deal with publicity.
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Susan Choi on Her Quarantine Reading Schedule
Susan Choi on the writer's responsibility to read and how the quarantine has given her more time to read.
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Caleb Azuma Nelson Wants Readers to Get Vulnerable
Caleb Azuma Nelson discusses his debut novel, Open Water, and the role its second person narrator plays in drawing out readers' vulnerability.
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They call it an accident, a catastrophe. But it was a war.
n+1 publishes a chilling personal account of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, as the crisis mounts at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
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Elizabeth Acevedo on Reading the Same Way You Eat
Elizabeth Acevedo discusses the joy of following the whims of your taste when it comes to reading choices.
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The Full Stop Book Club
Hot new online magazine Full Stop has chosen The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books as its inaugural book club selection. The discussion will be happening all this week.
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