“I feel nothing. I think: What an ugly place for it to happen. I call it The Accident. I didn’t hear, or see, or feel any of it, or if I did, I stored it somewhere irretrievable even to me.” Gloria Harrison‘s essay “Where the Highway Splits” stuns over at The Rumpus.
In Search of Lost Self
Retrofitted
Ever wondered exactly what “mod” is? A new book by Richard Weight (reviewed in The Guardian yesterday) sets out to answer that question.
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Fair Warning for Writers
Joe Hiland, The Indiana Review‘s fiction editor, has some advice for writers who submit to his (or any) magazine. He also lists “the three types of stories I most often reject because I feel like I’ve read them before.”
Rote She Wrote
At The NYT Mag, Virginia Heffernan‘s “Drill, Baby, Drill” explores the possibility that drills and memorization might not be quite as oppressive as some of the kinder, gentler pedagogues of our time suggest and offers a list of aps to help aspiring rote learners (Nota Bene: VerseByHeart).
The Two Percent
What would happen if two percent of the world’s population disappeared overnight? HBO’s new teaser for its adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers asks us to contemplate that question. From what we see so far, it looks terrifying. The series premieres on June 15.
Edan’s Story is The Standard
Our own Edan Lepucki’s “Ambulance of Boys” was one of the finalists in the Standard/Warby Short Story Contest. You can read check out all of the winners over here. (Edan’s is on page 8.)
Smith Wins Bailey’s
Ali Smith‘s How to Be Both has won the Bailey’s Prize for women’s fiction, placing her in the same ranks as Zadie Smith and Lionel Shriver. If you’re not too familiar with Smith’s work, Jonathan Russell Clark wrote about her for The Millions last year.
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