At BOMB Magazine, Patricia Engel speaks to fellow author Ingrid Rojas Contreras about her latest novel, Infinite Country, and how storytelling was instilled within her from an early age. ” I was bred on narratives,” Engel says, “and so my mind unconsciously assembles lived experience into story, searching for meaning, symbols, working out character psychologies and trails of cause and effect. Storytelling has allowed me to mine and map my own life, and also given me an outlet with which to understand human chaos. I stay with writing because it’s endlessly nourishing, and I also see it as an offering to those who came before me and those who will come after.”
Mining and Mapping Life with Patricia Engel
Choosing Covers
It’s not often that a major publisher listens to a new author when they request a specific painting be used for their book cover. But they listened to Naomi Jackson, and over at the Literary Hub she explains her choice of cover art for Star Side of Bird Hill and the Caribbean significance behind it.
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CSI: Poetry Edition
An international group of forensic experts studying the poet Pablo Neruda‘s remains, which were ordered exhumed in 2013, says he didn’t die of cancer, as the Nobel laureate’s official cause of death states. The question remains: was he poisoned? And if you want to see how Neruda lived, perhaps you might enjoy this tour of writers’ houses.
Double Threat
As if demonstrating exemplary literary skill weren’t enough, some overachieving authors were accomplished visual artists as well, notes AbeBooks in a roundup of talent that includes e e cummings, Günter Grass, Herman Hesse, and Jack Kerouac. Consider also our own Bill Morris on artists who channel writers in their own aesthetics.
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