“I haven’t met Drake, but I have of course met people who have met Drake. But you have to realize how o-l-d I am. I’m not likely to go to the same parties. Or many parties at all, to be frank.” Junot Diaz interviews Margaret Atwood for The Boston Review. We obviously recommend you read our respective interviews with them both, too.
Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again
Not Letting Go
Caleb Crain, author of American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation discusses the mixed feelings that a writer is subject to when it’s time to let go of a book.
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From Augere to Author
“I’ve always loved that ‘author’ derives from the Latin augere, to increase.” At The Guardian, Eleanor Catton discusses her inspiration for The Luminaries, which involved two years of research. Here’s our review of the finished product.
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Yiyun Li on Reporting Fiction
When describing the process of writing her latest book, Yiyun Li sees herself as more of an impartial reporter than a novelist.
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Artistic Solitude
“I used to run cross country in high school and it was like, I knew if I put in a certain kind of training, it was going to make me faster. If X, then Y. But with writing, it’s like, if X, if I do this thing that’s necessary, which is giving myself the space and time, then what? It’s sort of a question mark. You have no idea. You work so hard to offer yourself up to the space of the unknown.” Leslie Jamison (and Angela Flournoy and Katherine Towler) on being alone and setting aside the time to write.
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Roger Angell on the Triple Play
Even those who detest the sport can feel the joys of reading Roger Angell’s baseball writing. Case in point: his latest dispatch, in which he remarks on a recent triple play by saying, “What’s great about [triple plays] isn’t really their scarcity but the fact that they beautifully illustrate the invisible force that hovers about each pitch and play and inning and game in this pausing, staccato, and inexorably accruing pastime: the laws of chance.”
The Importance of Being Feminist
Liked watching Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk last year? Then consider picking up a copy of We Should All Be Feminists. The longform essay, now published as an ebook original, was adapted from topics Adichie touched upon in her speech, among them the importance of being a feminist in the twenty-first century. You could also look back on Adichie’s Year in Reading piece.
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