“There tends to be this idea that every piece and every assignment and every gig is always something speaking from the soul. We think that about great writers, that they’re incapable of doing hackwork.” The Rumpus interviewed Michelle Dean about women writers, the research process, and her forthcoming book, Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion. Pair with: Dean’s 2016 Year in Reading entry.
Staying Sharp
Know Every Name
Year in Reading alumna Porochista Khakpour has a stunning new story in Bennington Review. She writes, “I had made a point of trying to learn the names of everyone in my department, after my previous department chair at my last VAP job advised ‘best way to make a best impression is know every name of professor and student alike.’” For more of her writing, check out her Millions piece on George Saunders.
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Whither the Footy?
Apart from the fact that Anglo-Indian slang is an interesting topic in its own right, you should read this article simply to reward the writer for this lede: “Pyjamas did not exist until the 19th century.”
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Not All Dads Are Good Dads
Andrew Thurman writes about a literary genre he's particularly invested in: the Bad Dad Memoir, typically written by the offspring of said Bad Dads.
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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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Cat’s TV
This week in book-to-film adaptation news: Kurt Vonnegut‘s Cat’s Cradle is slated to become a TV show, “which will hopefully be long enough to fill an entire week’s worth of classes” for any desperate English teachers out there.
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