Ayobami Adebayo is interviewed by Abigail Bereola for Hazlitt and it’s fantastic. They discuss proverbs, romantic love, sickle cell anemia and writing your first book. “At the risk of sounding very narcissistic, I’m going to say I write for myself ultimately. And maybe my sister. I think that when I’m working, it’s very difficult for me to think about an audience, perhaps because sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming. I’m trying to figure out so many things that I really don’t start thinking about the idea that other people might read this thing until, ‘Oh my God, it’s publication day’ and I have a panic attack like ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ I think the awareness of an audience is something I’m just coming into because this is a first book.”
Ayobami Adebayo: Rising Star
Kesey Documentary
A new documentary on Ken Kesey and his band of Pranksters “presents the LSD-loving pioneers who spawned ’60s counterculture in their own words and images.”
Remarks on Color
Recommended Reading: On Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. “They have many things in common, but where they connect most strikingly is in their shared suspicion of theory and their emphasis on the visual.”
Reading With Our Ears
“But was I actually reading? I regarded myself as a reader, but were these really books?” In LitHub, James Tate Hill pens an essay about reading while visually impaired and the questions it raises in a print book obsessed world. Pair with: our own Bill Morris on hearing an actor narrate his novel’s audiobook.
The Point Issue 9: On Art, Commerce, and the Prescience of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
New at The Point: an incisive look at Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis that calls it “the most prescient American novel of the past fifteen years” and asks,”is it possible to mount any meaningful resistance to capitalism on the level of culture?” The latest print issue features this essay as well as a symposium on privacy, and will be launched at a release party in Hyde Park on Saturday night.
Whither the Bookshops?
The 1.5 million people who live in the Bronx lack a general interest bookstore, classifying their borough as one of a growing number of “book deserts” across the country. To combat this trend, the National Book Foundation just launched “The Book Rich Environment Initiative.” Meanwhile, Juma’a Ali runs a popular bookshop in a UN-administered refugee camp near the South Sudanese city of Malakal.
The Dead Author’s Home
J.D. Salinger‘s house is on the market and generating plenty of buzz, but before you make an offer consider “what does it mean to want to live in a dead writer’s house? When does fandom devolve into idolatry?”
The Lost City of Chabon
Michael Chabon teases us with a synopsis of his “wrecked” 1,500-page novel, Fountain City (to be excerpted in a forthcoming issue of McSweeney’s).
YA Origins
There’s been a lot of talk about Young Adult writing lately – we’ve covered it here and here and here – but where did YA come from, anyway? The New Yorker profiles writer S.E. Hinton, whose debut novel The Outsiders launched the genre, by way of answer.