“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
Deaf Poets Society
The inaugural issue of Deaf Poets Society is out, featuring new “intersectional disability literature & art.” For other recommended reading, don’t miss our Great Second-Half Book Preview.
Lacking Lacks
Henrietta Lacks is finally getting some credit for her genome’s contribution to science. The subject of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was formally recognized by the US National Institutes of Health for her HeLa cells.
Tuesday New Release Day: Chabon; Lamb; Walcott; Muldoon; Pushkin
New this week: Moonglow by Michael Chabon; I’ll Take You There by Wally Lamb; Morning, Paramin by Derek Walcott and Peter Doig; Selected Poems 1968-2014 by Paul Muldoon; and a new Richard Pevear translation of Alexander Pushkin’s complete prose. For more on these and other new titles, go read our latest fiction and nonfiction book previews.
Literary Map of Manhattan
An interactive literary map of Manhattan, at The New York Times Book Review: “Here’s where imaginary New Yorkers lived, worked, played, drank, walked and looked at ducks.” (via The Rumpus)
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Controversial Books
This week in book-related infographics: a look at the most controversial books of all time.
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Much to Sympathize With
Recommended Reading: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nervous Breakdown self-interview. (FYI, you can read an excerpt of Nguyen’s latest book over at Bloom.)
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A Fine Statement
This piece on the limited language of David Lynch from Dennis Lim over at The New Yorker is a fascinating journey into the mind of the peculiar auteur behind such gems as Eraserhead and Twin Peaks. Lynch will be publishing what he has called a “quasi-memoir” sometime in 2017.
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Six Plots Part II
I’ve written before about Matthew Jockers‘s claim, as reported and presented by the Paris Review, that there are only about 6 plots in fiction. Now Dan Piepenbring returns to the Review to respond to critics who and attempt to answer the questions “is it really possible to assign every word a reliable emotional valence? And even if the answer is yes, can we really claim that all the plots in the history of literature take so few basic forms?”