At O, Isabelle Allende discusses her newest book, A Long Petal of the Sea, with Elena Nicolaou, and how the world’s inexplicable nature drove her writing. “I grew up with the idea that the world is a very mysterious place,” Allende says, “and there are many dimensions of reality. If you open your heart and your mind, your heart is enriched by everything we cannot explain and control, but we see the evidence.”
Isabel Allende on the Many Dimensions of Reality
Words for Cash
Tim Parks takes a look at recent literary history and sincerely asks, does money make us write better? Supplementary reading: Nick Ripatrazone’s look into the economy of literary magazines.
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No Bastion for Books
“She gathered books to display for attendees and discovered that inside the cover of one, ‘The Koran for Dummies,’ someone had written “lies cover to cover,” drawn a swastika and made a disparaging remark about the Prophet Muhammad.” The president of the American Library Association reports “startling increases” in 2016 of vandalism, including hateful messages, at libraries. The Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has begun formally tracking such incidents to determine whether the increase is “a blip or a trend.”
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Vintage Hemingway
The Toronto Star is re-releasing the columns Ernest Hemingway wrote for the paper in the early 1920s. I particularly recommend his column on bullfighting, “Bullfighting is Not a Sport – It is a Tragedy.”
How to Get Rich or Write Trying
At The Awl, Noah Davis provides an honest overview of how difficult it can be to earn – or fail to earn – a living from freelance internet writing. Perhaps would-be freelancers should take a cue from Ian Hamilton’s 1998 London Review of Books essay in which he espoused the benefits – or perils – of accepting prizes and other literary subsidies.
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“He proposes that assholism is more rampant in society than ever before.”
Is this image of John McEnroe a great visual complement to John McWhorter’s review of Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years, or is it the greatest visual complement to John McWhorter’s review of Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years?
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