Over at The New York Times, Lauren Chistensen interviews Ottessa Moshfegh about her latest book, Death in Her Hands, which follows Vesta, an aging woman with a steadily fading grip on reality, whose isolation takes on new significance in today’s quarantined climate. “It isn’t so much that Vesta was alone and she went insane,” Moshfesh says. “This is a woman who chose to live in isolation to find peace toward the end of her life—and, in the process, encountered her imagination.”
Ottessa Moshfegh on Imagination in Isolation
America’s Next Top Laureate
California’s San Mateo County is “seeking nominations for poet laureate, someone who can act as an ambassador for literary arts.” Do you have what it takes?
D-I-Y #YiR12
We know you’re eagerly following our Year in Reading series, but we want you to participate, too! Our own Nick Moran has got the details up in a gif-filled Tumblr post.
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Sacred Literature
“Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.” Alexandra Alter interviews Salman Rushdie about his brand-new novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.
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Appearing Elsewhere
My story “I am the Lion Now” is the Story of the Week at Narrative Magazine.
Two Tumblrs Worth Seeing
Consider these two Tumblrs as late additions to my three-part (one, two, three) taxonomy of literary blogs. Writers at Work is three years in the making, so we’re a bit late to the party, but Erasing Infinite, which creates erasure poems out of each page of Infinite Jest, looks like it’s got a long way to go before it’s finished.
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