“But we are lured into believing that the first person is the manifestation of an authentic self. Or: we fall for the first person because we feel so little coherence in our own internal lives, and immersing ourselves in a sustained first person narrative gives us the false reassurance of an illusion.”
Another View
First Steps
Can a book prepare you for motherhood? A reader asks this question in the Match Book column in the Times.
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Book Scrapping
Not enough shelf space? Pay the people at 1DollarScan to scan and digitize your paper books into searchable PDF files for $1/100 pages.
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One Darkness to Another
"It’s the marriage of one kind of darkness to another... the black storm cloud of Neel’s pen is well suited to Dostoyevsky’s questions of God, reason, and doubt." On Alice Neel's illustrations for The Brothers Karamazov, from The Paris Review. Pair with our own Kevin Hartnett's much lighter take on the novel, "Reading The Brothers Karamazov: Even a Toddler Knows a Funny Name When He Hears One."
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YiR Alums In Spook
Are you familiar with Spook magazine founded and edited by Jason Parham? It focuses on promoting artists of color and their work. This month the fiction issue, was released and it features work from beloved writers (and Year in Reading alums!) Junot Diaz, Angela Flournoy, and Vinson Cunningham. Along with YiR favorite Justin Torres. You can buy it here! Perfect read for the snowy weekend.
Media Studies
How to make magazine apps that aren't completely terrible.
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Boy, Girl, Book?
Is the practice of using writing as a metaphor for birth, or birth as a metaphor for writing, in need of an overhaul? Stephanie Feldman for Electric Literature has some strong opinions on the subject. Motherhood on the brain, now? Check out this moving essay for The Millions on mothers and sons by Rachel Basch.