Newly announced National Book Award winner Sarah M. Broom recently spoke to the new class of Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant winners about the importance of sitting with unfinished work, and an excerpt from her talk can be found in the Paris Review. “The unfinished work is no less real, or necessary, or powerful than the book,” Broom says. “How we need it, this work, these long, beautiful digressions, these surprises. May we continue to gift writers with the time for wildness. May they ramble, digress, go beyond the edges of all the known and touted maps, may they hew close to the question, to unearth the questions beyond.”
Sarah M. Broom on Unfinished Work
How Should an Interview Be?
My Millions social media teammate Emily M. Keeler is probably too humble to write a Curiosity about her kickass interview with Sheila Heti. But not I, dear readers! Not I.
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On Board The Pequod
Recommended reading: Ben Shattuck spends a night and a day aboard a New England whaling ship in an attempt to better understand Ishmael’s (and Melville‘s) experiences, and combines Moby-Dick excerpts with his own accounts of life onboard in a piece for The Atlantic.
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Deja Moo: I’ve Heard This Bull Before
The fuss is currently over John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s clashes over factual accuracy, but frankly I’m tired of hearing about it. Maybe it’s because it sounds so reminiscent of David Shields’ Reality Hunger (2010). Or, better yet, maybe it’s because it sounds so reminiscent of David Sedaris’ Naked (1997).
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Seminar-Worthy Stocking Stuffers
In a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sarah Mesle reviews Mallory Ortberg‘s Texts from Jane Eyre, which “is not only a major work of bathroom humor reading, but also a significant contribution to feminist literary criticism. It is difficult to imagine another book that would both be a perfect stocking stuffer and an exemplary text for a seminar in literary studies.”
A Daisy Chain of Laffs
Turns out David Sedaris loves The Onion (but who doesn’t, really?). Slate asked more than 30 writers including Junot Díaz, Elif Batuman, Paul Beatty, Miranda July, and Chris Kraus to recommend their favorite funny books. Might we recommend you pair this with our own Jacob Lambert‘s comedic interpretation of Cormac McCarthy?
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Tin Man
Sergeant Ed Drew’s tintypes of the war in Afghanistan are the first tintypes made in a combat zone since The Civil War. Drew made them for his son. “I wanted him to know his father in the event that I was killed in action and it became less important that my work was done in tintype than that I could show the humanity of war in the eyes of airmen I fly combat missions with,” he said.