Apropos of nothing, here are some books to read when your country is invaded by Russians.
Red Dawn
Luck of a Genius
At Page-Turner, Willing Davidson interviews Karen Russell, the newly minted MacArthur Genius, Swamplandia! author and 20 Under 40 alum. The conclusion this writer came to after reading their back-and-forth? The phrases “luck lightning” and “King Doomsday” need to be used more often. (FYI, we published our own interview with Russell back in February.)
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“The void was me.”
Recommended Reading: an excerpt from Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss’s The Desert Places.
Professor Díaz
Junot Díaz has criticized MFA programs for being "too white." So what's on his syllabi? Salon found the syllabi for the two courses Díaz teaches at MIT. In his fantasy world-building class, students read everyone from Bram Stoker to Octavia Butler. His advanced fiction course includes stories by Edwidge Danticat and Roberto Bolaño. Where can we sign up?
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Finding Frances
Recommended Reading: Laura Van Prooyen's poem at The Missouri Review “Location: Frances.” "When I say Frances, I mean a woman. I mean/a place. The dead cling to the land."
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Which Author Spells The Best?
The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses is hosting their annual Spelling Bee Fundraiser on October 30th. New Yorker editor Ben Greenman will host the event, which will pit Jonathan Ames, Amor Towles and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures author Emma Straub against one another (and more) in a battle of lexicographic perspicacity. (Can you state the language of origin, please?) The event will be judged by none other than Jesse Sheidlower, editor of the inimitable Oxford English Dictionary.
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Eating And/Or Reading
"The joy of reading about the meals of others shows that, in many ways, we are simple creatures: by merely looking upon someone else eating we can feel better fed." In the New Yorker, Bee Wilson considers the "Pleasures of the Literary Meal," something Seth Sawyers wrote about for the Millions last year.
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Can The Millions (and The Rumpus, and every other somewhat-left-leaning lit site) please not traffic in fearmongering regarding Russia? What Sessions did in his confirmation hearing was a terrible and all-too-telling precedent, and there certainly are a whole lot of stray connections between figures involved in Trump’s campaign (and the right-wing / international nationalist movement more generally) that one can conjecture about. But there is as yet no concrete *evidence* of a Russian “invasion.” In the meantime, there are plenty of terrors in the Trump admin’s regard for immigrants and brown and black people for us all to focus on, educate ourselves about, and resist. Same goes for their stance on government agencies and regulations. How about a deregulation reading list, or one that probes Steve Bannon’s desire to gut the government…?