At the Rumpus, author and poet Musa Okwonga discusses In the End, It Was All About Love, a book that required him to be comfortable with the unknown. “For me—I don’t want to be universal—for me as a writer, the frightening thing about writing is that I often don’t know where I’m going to end up,” Okwonga says. “Not in terms of a plot, but I’m not sure what I’ll discover about myself, and the thing about writing a memoir, it’s about being seen. People write memoirs and they emerge being hated. So, when you’re writing, sometimes you’re afraid of what’s going to emerge.”
Musa Okwonga Does Not Strive to Be Universal
Amazon Announces Free One-Day Shipping
As the holiday shopping wars heat up, Amazon has announced a surprise offer of free one-day shipping through December 22 on thousands of items, but not, as best as I can tell, books. Of course, in Amazon’s eyes, all those ebooks already ship instantaneously.
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Tuesday New Release Day: d’Ambrosio; Erpenbeck; Pericoli; Dueñas; Boland; Brecht; Munro
New this week: Loitering by Charles d’Ambrosio; The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck; Windows on the World, a collection of Paris Review essays illustrated by Matteo Pericoli (Karl Ove Knausgaard’s contribution is excerpted here); The Heart Has Its Reasons by María Dueñas; A Woman Without a Country by Eavan Boland; Love Poems by Bertolt Brecht; and Family Furnishings, a new selection of short stories by Nobel laureate Alice Munro. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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Tuesday New Release Day
Out this week: Larry McMurtry’s third memoir, Hollywood, about his time in showbiz. Also newly released, the debut effort from Rosecrans Baldwin, You Lost me There.
Writing Blind
James Tate Hill shares his experiences as a writer who cannot read. “When I say I can’t read, I’m not referring to illiteracy, but to the large blind spots in my central field of vision that put an end to my unremarkable driving career a few months after my 16th birthday.”
Big, Bent Ears
This week the Paris Review launched a new online series, Big, Bent Ears, a “Serial in Documentary Uncertainty” masterminded by Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss. Each installation features “a combination of video, audio, photography, and writing in various arrangements and states of completion,” and the first chapter overlaps Joseph Mitchell and the Big Ears Music Festival even though “the two projects seem to share little: one concerns a wordsmith, a chronicler, and preserver of fading traditions; the other, musicians challenging tradition and musical forms on a sometimes radical basis.”
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Always and Never
Nicola Griffith gives us guidelines for writing about disabled people.
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Two More for the Wish List
At BOMB, Danielle Dutton speaks with me about her new press Dorothy, a publishing project, which just published two books you’ll want to add to your wish list, Renee Gladman‘s Event Factory and Barbara Comyns‘ Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead.
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