At the Creative Independent, Lucy Ives discusses her new story collection, Cosmogony, and how she accepted the struggle of balancing a writing life with making a living. “It takes a lot of practice,” Ives says. “I think people don’t talk about that, that writing itself—not just like, ‘Oh, it’s hard.’ But that it isn’t natural. It’s like playing the piano or something like that. You have to stay with it to be able to do it well, or be happy with what you’re doing. I don’t have great advice about it, because I think, to me, at least, it remains a struggle, but I think you also get more accepting of the fact that it is a bit of a struggle all the time.”
Accepting the Struggle with Lucy Ives
Halloween Reading: Existential Horror Edition
“Every year, as Halloween draws near, I get to thinking about what makes books scary,” writes Ben Dooley in his introduction to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. It’s a book that “’gets’ existential horror,” Dooley claims. Intrigued? Well be sure to check out not only his review of the book, but also our interview with its author.
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A digressive and beautifully written announcement.
“Maybe everything is an organized mess at high speed”: in one of the more deeply buried leads in history, Brad Listi announces The Nervous Breakdown‘s new publishing imprint. And yes, I could just send you to the official press release, but I loved this piece.
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An Anonymous Evangelical Poetry Fan
In what might be the first sighting of its kind, an anonymous evangelical poetry fan has made an appearance in the comments of Elizabeth Lucy Conway’s recent essay on teaching poetry.
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Film Time with Steve
Looking for something to watch this weekend? Steve Buscemi’s ranked his top ten films in the Criterion Collection.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Film Them
If eight Harry Potter movies weren’t enough, we can expect three new Warner Brothers films about J.K. Rowling’s spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The trilogy will feature the magical zoologist Newt Scamander as he goes on adventures in New York 70 years prior to the Potter characters.
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Transcendentalist by Day; Awful Cook by Night
How could anybody believe Henry David Thoreau invented raisin bread? The Walden author once burned down about 300 acres of forest trying to cook fish!
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Another Place and Time
Edmund White considers writers’ obsession with New York City in the 1970s, with photography by Peter Hujar. As White puts it, that was “a place and a time in which, rich or poor, you were stuck together in the misery (and the freedom) of the place, where not even money could insulate you.”
The Atlantic Remembers Mark Twain
Mark Twain’s birthday was yesterday (176!), and The Atlantic took a moment to remember his gifts to the magazine, a relationship which began in 1869, and got Twain twice as much pay as other Atlantic contributors.