True crime is more than a recent podcast trend—just take a look at Casey Cep’s forthcoming Furious Hours. The book tells the tale of Harper Lee’s journey to Alexander City, Ala., in the 1970s to write about a gruesome murder that was staged to look like a car accident. A video produced by Dustin Stephens from CBS recounts the famous author’s attempt to learn more about the crime, with “Lee [deciding] she was going to try her hand at crime writing, showing up at the two-day trial.”
Harper Lee’s Unsolved Mystery
Kathleen Alcott on the Writing Life
At the Rumpus, Kathleen Alcott provides a poignant recollection of what she inherited as a writer from her father: “And is it worth it? Was it for my father, is it for me, for nearly every writer I’ve met, whose default answer is ‘Yes’?”
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Jailhouse Rock
Can’t get enough of Orange is the New Black? Neither could The Missouri Review. Their new blog series, Literature on Lockdown, shares narratives from those who teach or write in prisons. This week’s post comes from Ace Boggess, a poet who spent five years in a West Virginia prison. “One thing about being a writer in prison is that you have not lost everything. You still have that driving need to speak whatever truth you know in whatever way you can. No one can take that away from you, not even the State.”
Pre-Revolutionary Russia… In Living Color
Tsar Nicholas II commissioned Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky to document pre-revolutionary Russia. His color photographs taken between 1904 and 1916 are incredible.
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