“Everything I learned about writing, I learned from watching people.” David Sedaris talks with The Rumpus about IHOP and his newly published collection of diary entries Theft by Finding.
Formative Pancakes
Annals of Translation
Recommended Reading: The largest publishers of translated works in the United States published less in 2015 than they normally do—503 works of fiction down from 597 from the previous year.
●
●
The Value of Difficulty
“When we read a book that requires that effort — when the act of reading becomes rigorous and self-aware, rather than effortless and transparent — we get to have a history with what we’ve given ourselves to, a history etched into us by the demanding friction of its difficulty.” Zoë Heller and Leslie Jamison debate whether or not we overvalue difficult literature in The New York Times.
Living like Fitzgerald
“Recent research has shown that messy, dark, noisy, booze-filled environments like the one Fitzgerald cultivated at La Paix can, in fact, help stimulate creativity.” The Atlantic reports on the importance of environment for creativite work and / or gives you an excuse to live like Fitzgerald.
●
●
Come On, Karma
From Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to George Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, here are five of the most annoyingly unpunished characters in all of literature. Can we petition to have Daisy Buchanan (The Great Gatsby) added to this list?
The Faces of War
Photographer Lalage Snow photographed Scottish soldiers before, during, and after their deployments to Afghanistan. The photographs show “the toll that fighting … takes on our troops.”
●
●
Recommended Reading: Yoko Ogawa
Recommended Reading: Hotel Iris author Yoko Ogawa’s fiction in Guernica, “The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger.”
●
●