“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
….and the joke may just be on you.
Aaron Wiener for Slate on attending a 24-hour long play in Berlin based on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. And we thought three to four hours of DFW was a marathon.
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No Se Habla
Back in March, I pointed readers to an interview with Minae Mizumura, whose recent book, The Fall of Language in the Age of English, makes a case against the dominance of the English language in the modern age. Now, at Full-Stop, Sho Spaeth reviews the book. Sample quote: “She has a curious blindness to what may be her greatest offense of all to the prevailing attitude of our age: a naive rejection of the idea that novels, and their novelists, exist merely to entertain.”
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Greatly Exaggerated
At 74, Clive James is a remarkably prolific poet, one who’s working hard to finish or publish three books in the next year alone. He spoke with Douglas Murray of The Spectator about his unflagging energy. “At the moment, I am in the slightly embarrassing position where I write poems saying I am about to die and I don’t,” he says. You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg on James’s book Cultural Amnesia.
He’s on the Fence
On Wednesday, the BBC Radio 4 program Four Thought broadcasted an essay by our own Mark O’Connell that lays out a novel argument: we should embrace the value of ambivalence. (We’re not sure how to feel about that.)
Tuesday New Release Day: Falcones; Fallada; Kristeva; le Carré; Anh; Twain
Out this week: The Barefoot Queen by Ildefonso Falcones; A Stranger in My Own Country by Hans Fallada; Teresa, My Love by Julia Kristeva; an omnibus edition of John le Carré’s first three novels; Ticket to Childhood by Nguyen Nhat Anh; and a new volume of letters by Mark Twain. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
And The Problem With That Problem
The problem with memoir is well-known. What’s less well-known is the problem with the problem with memoir.
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