At Vox, Ottessa Moshfegh discusses her 2018 book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and how it has taken on a life of its own during the pandemic. “Everyone I know has gone through an internal transformation,” Moshfegh says, “And that makes perfect sense. That’s why I write about isolated characters — so they can have a deeper relationship with themselves in the course of the novel. That’s why I’m slightly antisocial to begin with, too. I spend a lot of time having to figure out what’s going on inside. […] In a time where there has been so much trauma and loss, it was a silver lining. Humanity finds purpose where it can. It’s like flowers growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk. People can grow anywhere. That is beautiful.”
Ottessa Moshfegh on Isolated Characters Growing Anywhere
How the Novel Made the World
In the June Atlantic, William Deresiewicz revisits that old favorite subject, the past and future of the Great American novel, in a review of two new books about the history of novels: The Dream of the Great American Novel by Laurence Buell and The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt. (Dizzy yet? If not, consider nine other experts’ opinions on the Great American Novel here at The Millions, for a round dozen.)
●
●
King James
“He is the king, after all, and kings don’t lead revolutions. They rule wary of them.” Just about everything that Rowan Ricardo Phillips has to say about basketball is recommended reading at this point, and this piece on Lebron James and kingship is no different. This older piece on Steph Curry and the sustainability of brilliance is an early highlight.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: DeLillo, Tulli, Ozick, Martin
Don DeLillo’s first short story collection, The Angel Esmerelda, is out this week, as is Magdalena Tulli’s genre-defying In Red. New in paperback are Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies and Steve Martin’s An Object of Beauty.
A Time of Scarcity
“I realized that there was something wrong with an arrangement whereby a relatively affluent person such as I had become could afford to write about minimum wage jobs, squirrels as an urban food source or the penalties for sleeping in parks, while the people who were actually experiencing these sorts of things, or were in danger of experiencing them, could not.” Barbara Ehrenreich on writing about poverty.
●
●
Costume Drama
Callan Wink, the Wyoming writer who’s published two stories in The New Yorker since 2011, has a new story, “One More Last Stand,” in Granta’s Spring issue. Among other things, it depicts the oddly frightening “heat of battle re-enactment.”
●
●
Brooklyn Art Book Fair Kicks Off Tonight
More than 40 independent, artist-run presses and organizations will be on hand, including Pioneerworks Press, BOMB Magazine, Printed Matter, Wendy’s Subway, and Meekling Press.
●
●
●
Aargh!
An analysis of the unsexy history of the word “Argh” with a catalog of its appearance during sexually explicit scenes in 5o Shades of Grey. Cf. Elizabeth Minkle’s Millions essay on 5o Shades and fan fiction.
●
●
Writin’ State o’ Mind
“I try to edit my work in different states of mind. So I’ll go running on a really hot day and then read the 2,000 words I just wrote. Or if I’m upset, or really sleepy, or if I’m drunk, I’ll read this stuff. If you’re sleepy and you find yourself skipping over a paragraph because you’re bored by it and just want to get to the interesting part, it comes out. Those different states of mind are a really interesting filter.” Writing advice from Sebastian Junger.