Joe Fassler interviews recent MacArthur Genius and Year-in-Reading alum Viet Thanh Nguyen on the myth of overnight success, balancing an academic career while still finding time to write novels and the sacrifices all writers must make. Over at Electric Literature.
A 20 Year Overnight Success
Norman Mailer Slept Here
You can purchase Norman Mailer’s Provincetown home for the cool price of $3.9 million. The house was previously used for the Norman Mailer Center’s Summer Writers Colony, which Millions contributor A. Igoni Barrett attended and wrote about for Electric Literature.
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Like Reading How-To Manuals
James Hynes discusses the books he read when writing his latest novel, Next: "I wanted to see if I could write a day-in-the-life novel, a narrative that would be set in a single day, or part of one, and by working backwards and forwards through flashbacks, encompass the entire life of a single character."
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Our Stonecutters
Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Stonecutter. In the most recent issue, you’ll find our own Lydia Kiesling’s essay on cigarettes and literature; in Issue #2, you’ll find Mark O’Connell discussing Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses. You read that correctly: 50% of all Stonecutter issues feature Millions staffers.
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Needs a Good Family
Seventy-two copies of One Story are looking for loving homes. Reader, will you be a dear and adopt a hungry short story?
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Super YA
What if the Hulk kept a diary? Marvel Entertainment’s new young adult books mix superheroes with chicklit. The She-Hulk Diaries and Rogue Touch, featuring the X-Men super heroine as a teenager, are bringing romance back to comics. The biggest surprise, they’re actually good, according to critics at Wired.
Translating Lorem Ipsum
Nick Richardson has some fun on the London Review of Books blog by discussing the challenges of translating Lorem Ipsum, a bit of filler Latin/Greek nonsense text that resembles an “extreme Mallarmé, or a Burroushian cut-up, or a paragraph of Finnegans Wake.”
The Right Kind of Ambivalence
In the latest entry in By Heart, which I’ve written about before, Thirty Girls author Susan Minot explains why she prefers to read multiple books at once instead of reading through single books from start to finish. Her reasoning? Books are “worlds to dip in and out of, and my relationship to them is continually deepening and evolving.”