“While guys spent time in these Seg cells calling out chess moves over the walkways or doing push-ups until their veins bulged from their temples, I was in my cell pecking away trying to create a different world for myself. Some kind of way I felt I could rewrite my future.” For The New Yorker‘s Page-Turner blog, Daniel A. Gross tells the story of the Swintec Corporation, the nation’s sole supplier of clear typewriters, whose largest market is prisons. Pair with our own Bill Morris on using his Royal to write.
Going Clear
Not a Soirée
At The Guardian, Susanna Rustin interviews the Irish writer Edna O’Brien, whose new anthology of stories, The Love Object, comes out as an e-book this week. Among other things, she compares a writer who works on a book for only one day a week with a parent who leaves a toddler unsupervised: “You can’t find it again.”
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Writers on Writing
Recommended listening: Writers on Writing, a playlist of TED talks from NPR that pair well with our own Nick Ripatrazone‘s essay on “vertical writing” and Michelle Huneven‘s breakdown of “The Trouble With Writing.”
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Tuesday New Release Day
Lots of diet books among the new releases these days (in preparation for the post-holiday food guilt one assumes), but readers will also find a vibrant new “biography-in-collage” out this week, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss.
Finishing Novels in Prison
The China Daily has an article today criticizing corrupt Chinese officials for signing lucrative book deals in prison. They must not know that some of the world’s most influential works of philosophy and fiction were written in the slammer.
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