“Reading is a type of reckoning with the self. That may sound like a simplistic platitude, but platitudes exist only because they are true, our self-serving intellectual mirrors be damned.” Cher Tan shares a lifetime’s reading history with Catapult, tracing her trajectory from “[k]eeping up with the boys” during high school to this past year, in which she made a personal pact to read only books written by people of color. Pair with our own Nick Ripatrazone in conversation with six authors on their childhood reading.
A Life in Books
The Bard is Back
Shakespeare’s First Folio will leave its heavily guarded vault to tour the U.S. in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the bard’s death. You could also read our essay on the holiness of Shakespeare.
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai on Writing with Empathy
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai discusses her debut novel, The Mountains Sing, which follows four generations of a Vietnamese family.
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Whose Hasn’t?
Sergey Stefanovich’s “The Library” takes viewers through Duncan Fallowell’s library “which has spilled over into every available space and become an art installation in its own right.”
On Social Novels
“What if, instead of simply critiquing Go Set a Watchman’s failure, we tried to analyze it? The new, older work makes more sense if we read it as an attempt to accomplish two tasks: first, to master—unsuccessfully, it turns out—the smart-magazine style that Harper Lee developed in her student journalism; and second, to write in a genre that often relied on the ironic elisions typical of ‘smart style’: the midcentury social-problem novel.” Tom Perrin on Harper Lee and the social novel. Pair with Michael Bourne’s Millions review.
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The End of Giovanni’s Room
America’s oldest LGBT bookstore, Giovanni’s Room, is closing on May 17. The Philadelphia staple is shutting its doors after four decades due to the owner’s retirement and financial problems. At Salon, Steve Berman remembers the store and discusses how its closure will affect the publishing and LGBT community. “So LGBT books are forced to the edges, to the shadows, despite claims of assimilation. Gay authors have to do more and more marketing to find readers. Gay publishers have to struggle with shrinking venues to showcase their titles.”
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Journalistic Disturbances
In 2009, Rivka Galchen wrote a lengthy piece in Harper’s about the quest to predict and control hurricanes. Now that her article is sadly apropos, it’s available for free on the web. (Said quest had a major role in the author’s excellent first novel.)
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