In her new poetry collection, Oculus, Sally Wen Mao explores various subjects from Anna May Wong to Wong Kar-wai to personhood to objecthood. Anne A. Cheng interviews Mao for Bomb Magazine, and they discuss how these topics merge in her confessional poems. Sally Wen Mao discusses art’s role in redeeming history and reimagining “lost moments, the feelings never expressed, the secrets never surfaced,” Mao writes. “I think that it’s possible for art to reckon with and mourn this loss even as it imagines or recovers what has been lost. I think it’s possible to simultaneously arrive at both.”
Sally Wen Mao Reimagines Lost Moments
Tuesday New Release Day: Pamuk; Murray; Houellebecq; Smiley; Cantor; Shonkwiler; Vowell
Out this week: A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk; The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray (whom our own Mark O’Connell interviewed today); Submission by Michel Houellebecq; Golden Age by Jane Smiley; The Hours Count by Jillian Cantor; Moon Up, Past Full by Eric Shonkwiler; and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
Antebellum YA
Move over Bella and Edward; Scarlett and Rhett were the original young adult power couple. At The New York Times, Claire Needell argues that Gone with the Wind is the epitome of the young adult novel. “The choice between two starkly different lovers (one gentlemanly, one roguish) appears, for the very young, to be a choice between two utterly distinct potential identities, two possible roads through life.”
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A Community of Writers
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Twitter: like a teenager high on Valium
This week, David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas and the forthcoming The Bone Clocks) is releasing a new short story over 280 tweets (which you can read here). Form follows content, he explains, since his narrator is a teenager high on his mother’s Valium. Mitchell joins good company: Teju Cole, Junot Diaz, and other notables have tried their hand with this strange new form. Pair with: a stroll down memory lane with some beloved authors’ very first tweets and their best.
Oh, Tom Drury, how I love thee.
If you’re a fan of Tom Drury (and if you aren’t–what’s wrong with you?), you’ll be excited to know that the new short film based on his short story “Path Lights” is now online at the David Lynch Foundation. The film was directed by Zachary Sluser, and stars John Hawkes.
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