“Here is a fascinating conundrum: The creator of a scientifically delegitimized blueprint of the human mind and of a largely discontinued psychotherapeutic discipline retains the cultural capital of history’s greatest playwright and the erstwhile Son of God.” On Freud.
Talk About That
Downthread
It’s notable when a respected magazine publishes a short story written in the form of a comment thread. It’s even more notable when the author of that story is Bobbie Ann Mason. At The Nervous Breakdown, new fiction from the author of Shiloh and Other Stories.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Knausgaard; Straub; Zentner; Collins; Bird; Henderson; Hopkins
Book Three of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle is out this week, as is a new novel by Millions contributor Emma Straub. Also out: The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner; The Untold by Courtney Collins; Above the East China Sea by Sarah Bird; Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson; and a new volume of the Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2014 Book Preview.
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“My life work decided”
“The most important year of life. Every emotion and my life work decided. Miserable and ecstatic but a great success.” What F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his financial ledgers the year he married Zelda Sayre and sold This Side of Paradise.
This Calls for a (Left-Handed) High Five
People laugh when I tell them: everybody’s born right-handed, but the best overcome it. But now, take heed my Southpaw brethren. Science may be on our side. One recent study indicates that left-handedness may lead to “a boost in a specific kind of creativity—namely, divergent thinking, or the ability to generate new ideas from a single principle quickly and effectively.”
Dispatches from Guangzhou
Take a vicarious trip to China via a special issue of Ninth Letter, a literary and arts journal published by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Including work by authors Madelaine Thien and Khaled Al Khamissi, the issue grew out of a residency sponsored by Sun Yat-sen University’s Center for English-language Creative Writing, the only such department of its kind in that country. Pair with this piece by Casey Walker about writing his novel Last Days in Shanghai, which is set in the boomtown of today’s new China.