“The notebook was there, unharmed, tucked inside a Ziploc freezer bag, with ‘Sep. 8, 1909,’ written in black marker.” After Hurricane Irma passed over Key West, Florida, writer and historian Brewster Chamberlin confirmed the relic he had found in May was safe: a notebook containing the first short story by a 10-year-old Ernest Hemingway. See also: The Millions’ own Michael Bourne’s essay on Hemingway as a “Middlebrow Revolutionary.”
Hemingway’s First Short Story Unearthed
Moral Fiction
Matthew Salesses talks about moral fiction and how to address prejudice in writing at Electric Lit. A piece of his essay: “The writing of fiction cannot treat marginalized characters as vessels, cannot let the plot play out the racism of under-enlightened protagonists. Perhaps the ultimate conclusion is that one cannot write without prejudice unless one understands that one has prejudice.” Pair with his recent essay at The Millions on plot and the inciting incident.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Cole; Russell; Coover; Grossman; Long; Thompson; Pirzad
Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief is out this week, as is Karen Russell’s e-book novella Sleep Donation. Also out: The Brunist Day of Wrath by Robert Coover; Falling Out of Time by David Grossman; Bad Teeth by Dustin Long; The Land of Steady Habits by Ted Thompson; and The Space Between Us by Zoya Pirzad.
Translations of Loneliness
“In Rilke’s essay on Auguste Rodin, written in the same year, he describes the sculptor’s visits to the Jardin des Plantes early in the morning to sketch the sleepy animals. And later on, in Rodin’s studio on the Rue de l’Université, he observes a tiny plaster cast of an antique tiger that Rodin treasured: ‘There is a cast of a panther, of Greek workmanship, hardly as big as a hand…. If you look from the front under its body into the space formed by the four powerful soft paws, you seem to be looking into the depths of an Indian stone temple; so huge and all-inclusive does this work become.’” Henri Cole on the poet and a place that inspired his work.
OWS: Book Coming Soon
The Occupy Wall Street history will be published by OR Books, a company which rose to fame after publishing Going Rouge, a collection of negative essays about Sarah Palin that was released on the same day as her memoir, Going Rogue.
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Reconsidering Jane
A scholar studying Jane Austen’s original manuscripts finds “we have simply overestimated her as a perfect English stylist at the expense of how experimental she was.”
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Runways for Days
“I took my son to Paris fashion week, and all I got was a profound understanding of who he is, what he wants to do with his life, and how it feels to watch a grown man stride down a runway wearing shaggy yellow Muppet pants.” Michael Chabon writes a beautiful piece for GQ about going couturing with his son, Abraham. Pair with yesterday’s essay by R. J. Hernández on fashion in literary fiction.
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