At Lit Hub, Morgan Jerkins reflects on the importance of researching and telling her family’s story, as seen in her new book, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots. “The closer I moved towards my subjects and their homelands, the more intimate the book became,” Jerkins writes. “The more I researched, the more I knew what was at stake. I knew methodological data was not enough. To detail Black living and death, I needed a gumbo of tools: journals, articles, scholarly interviews, oral history, and personal history. I didn’t ignore the omissions—I exposed them. I confessed my frustration and I spoke of the foundation for these omissions. Then I kept going because I had to.”
Morgan Jerkins on Exposing History’s Omissions
War and Sociology
What can we learn about Leo Tolstoy by reading the German sociologist Max Weber? Let Jeremy Klemin from 3:AM Magazine explain. While we’re on Tolstoy, here’s a complementary piece that asks the age old question–who’s better: Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky?
A Day in the Life of a Literary Agent
“There really is no average day in the life of a literary agent,” writes Mark Gottlieb in his attempt to describe an average day in the life of a literary agent.
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Death, Sex, Money & James McBride
Recommended listening: Death, Sex & Money talks with James McBride, winner of the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction.
Fear and Loathing in Ketchum, Idaho
Don’t worry, everybody — Anita Thompson, widow of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, has finally returned the prized pair of antlers that Thompson stole from the Idaho home of Ernest Hemingway, himself. The antlers, which he stole while in Idaho on assignment reporting on Hemingway’s suicide, had hung in Thompson’s garage for the past fifty-four years.
Idolizing Hemingway
Robert Roper wonders whether or not Ernest Hemingway‘s death has “eclipsed his work.” Elsewhere, Melville House wonders whether or not the FBI had something to do with it. The author’s influence is as apparent today as ever before, though perhaps it’s not his death that endures, but rather his perceived masculine mystique.
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Jonathan Safran Foer, Cut Up
Did you know that a new Jonathan Safran Foer book is coming out this week? We didn’t until we saw a mention of it at Kottke. More surprising is the form of the book itself. Foer has created a new work called Tree of Codes by cutting out sections of one of his favorite books, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Shulz. The die-cut, Kindle-proof volume is the first major title by London-based Visual Editions. Vanity Fair has more.