Tom Hanks’s debut collection of short stories is due out in October. “The theme of the collection will be typewriters,” reports The Guardian, “with each tale involving one of these more and more scarce machines.”
Tom Hanks, Fiction Writer
Uncommon Language
Writing about a foreign country is always a dodgy proposition, but it seems to be especially thorny when English people and Americans take on their transatlantic brethren. Looking over two contributions to the genre by English writers — Terry Eagleton’s Across the Pond and A.A. Gill’s To America With Love — Carlin Romano concludes that neither manages to “teach us something new about ourselves.”
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On Colors and the Mind
Here’s a fascinating article by Aatish Bhatia about “how we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains.” Grab a seat; this is a good one.
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The Week of Lydia Davis
If you don’t have a New Yorker subscription and can’t read Dana Goodyear’s wonderful profile of Lydia Davis, then you can at the very least check out the Can’t and Won’t author’s interview with Quarterly Conversation. Or, of course, you could just go straight to the source and mainline some of her short fiction directly.
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The Master
Junot Diaz on What is a Writer
Junot Díaz writes in O. Magazine about the harrowing, doubt-and-terror-filled decade-plus he spent writing his Pulitzer-prize winning first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
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New Critical Flame
Issue three of The Critical Flame has arrived. Richard Nash’s review of Ted Striphas’ The Late Age of Print is a highlight.
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