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
Wolfe Goes Back to Wall Street
“We find ourselves in a swarm of fellow starstruck souls outside the Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, churning, squirming.” 25 years after the publication of Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe returns to the subject of Wall Street. You can also check out my review of his most recent novel, Back to Blood, over here.
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Booksellers React to Borders’ Bankruptcy
Half of all restaurants that open close,” WORD owner Christine Onorati says. On the other hand, Red Lemonade publisher Richard Nash hopes former Borders employees can find ways to continue “operating as the matchmakers of the book ecosystem.”
A Chinese Finnegan
“May God give me the courage to finish it:” The London Review of Books profiles one woman’s attempt to translate Finnegans Wake into Mandarin Chinese.
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I Grow Old
“If there is one thing more depressing than reading other people’s old letters it is reading one’s own.” Becoming T. S. Eliot.
Wizard Jail
Recommended Reading: Hannah Rose-Woods on totalitarianism in the wizarding world.