“While I’m glad we’ve had this chance to talk, because of time constraints I cannot answer these basic questions about race and how racism works.” Colson Whitehead considers new business cards. See our review of his Pulitzer-winning The Underground Railroad here.
Shots Fired
Non-Directional Horniness
“Pink Trance Notebooks is the mind working, is material rising from somewhere deep to be shaped and reshaped into blocks of dreamlike text. It is also surface: material gathered from within reach.” Sarah Gerard at Hazlitt in an interview with Wayne Koestenbaum, whose new book is out in October.
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Authoring Change
The Boston Globe profiles Daniel Coquillette, co-author of the first comprehensive history of Harvard Law School. “Deeming the previous attempts lackluster, Coquillette and Bruce Kimball resolved to produce an honest, critical look at Harvard Law School’s founding — and its oftentimes bigoted history.” His book inspired students to take action to retire the school’s crest.
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An Unquenchable Thirst
In An Unquenchable Thirst by Mary Johnson, the former nun, who served alongside Mother Teresa, details her disenchantment with the religious life she once found so appealing.
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Britain’s Illuminated Manuscripts
Illuminated manuscripts such as bestiaries and bibles, prayer books and propaganda, histories and stories, each owned and annotated by kings and queens, go on display at the British Library in London. (“The Genius of Illumination”, November 11-March 13)
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The Lorax Mourns Another Tree
Readers across the country are mourning a fallen Monterey cypress tree, said to have inspired the classic Dr. Seuss book The Lorax.
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Alice Munro’s First Book
“I didn’t really understand what reading was for. If I wanted a story, the thing to do was to get my grandmother to read it to me. Then listening to her voice, her story-reading voice which always sounded a little incredulous, marvelling, yet full of faith, bravely insistent, and watching her face, its meaningful and utterly familiar expressions—lifted eyebrows, ominously sinking chin, brisk little nods of agreement when, as sometimes happened, a character said something sensible—then I would feel the story grow into life and exist by itself, so that it hardly seemed to me that she was reading it out of a book at all; it was something she had created herself, out of thin air… But one summer I had the whooping-cough, and afterwards I could not go swimming or jump off the beams in the barn or boss my little brother, because by that time he had the whooping-cough himself. My grandmother was off somewhere, visiting other cousins. So I swung on my swing until I got dizzy, and then for no reason in particular I took the Child’s History out of the bookcase in the front room, and sat down on the floor and started to read.” Alice Munro writes about A Child’s History of England, the first book she ever read.
Rejecting Tidy Narratives
For Lenny, Lidia Yuknavitch talks about suffering, art, and her path to writing. “I believe in art the way other people believe in God,” she says. For more of her writing, check out her Millions essay on grief that births art.