We’ve recommended reading up on Jenny Zhang‘s Sour Heart before, this interview in Hazlitt is one of our favorites. “And maybe this is crude to talk about, it’s not even that I don’t want to write a memoir. Beyond that, do you understand how vulnerable it makes someone to call something nonfiction? Not just emotionally vulnerable but financially vulnerable, do you realize someone that makes $40,000 a year cannot be hit by a lawsuit by some angry ex who objected about a chapter about him? Some guy sees one line about him, missing thousands of lines not about him. That’s why celebrities are the ones who write memoirs.”
Non Fiction Takes a Certain Vulnerability
The Fleshy School
It looks like it's a poetry kind of morning. Spring is on its way, and what better way to celebrate than with Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Sun's Shame," a poem of death and desire ... and also sunshine: "All soulless now, yet merry with the Spring!"
Word Games
In an effort to adjust more comfortably to the modern age, the Merriam-Webster company is revamping its iconic dictionary, the first to focus mainly on American English. At Slate, Stefan Fatsis considers the changes, which raise the question of what a modern dictionary should look like. Related: our own Bill Morris on the American Heritage Dictionary.
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Arab Authors on Twitter
If you woke up this morning and thought, "You know, I could use more Arab authors on my Twitter feed," then boy do I have the link for you.
Computer of Horrors
If you're on the East Coast and still have power, don't let Sandy ruin your Halloween - feast your eyes on these vintage horror paperback covers, instead. Stay safe!
Sinking (and Swimming) as a Debut Novelist
At The Nervous Breakdown Marie Mutsuki Mockett writes about being uninvited from a reading in New York and other obstacles to promoting her first novel, and how she channeled her creativity to take charge of her own PR.
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David Mamet Appliance Center
The “David Mamet Appliance Center” has some predictably abrasive customer service representatives. Here is Peter McCleery for McSweeney’s imagining a hilarious and existentially hopeless exchange between customer and technician. The Millions has even more to satisfy your fictitious-Mamet fix: an imagined symposium with Mamet, Francine Prose, and James Wood among others.