At Electric Literature, Marie-Helene Bertino discusses the importance of disrupting realism in her fiction and opting to explore the fantastical to get closer to the truth. “Perhaps we want to break the laws of physics because it’s fun,” Bertino says, “because we want to reach a particular emotional resonance unable to be accessed through conventional methods. Because we do not think using the supernatural elements is out of the ordinary. Because the supernatural is our ordinary and to write realism would be, for us, stranger. Perhaps we venture outside realism because to express our understanding of life, because removing the middleman of simile and making the figurative real feels more honest.”
Marie-Helene Bertino Breaks the Laws of Physics
The Kenyon Review 2013 Short Fiction Contest
What can you do for free these days? Well, for one thing, you can apply to The Kenyon Review’s 2013 Short Fiction Contest. The deadline is February 28th.
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That Title Alone Deserves A Groan
A decade in the making, Val Kilmer’s one-man play about Mark Twain, Citizen Twain, will finally open this weekend. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with the actor (at a cemetery?) to talk about “his career and the landscape of America.”
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Dispatch from Mississippi
Students from the Mississippi Schools for Mathematics and Science share poems and essays about life in their home state, inspired by William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright.
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Citizen of the Year Reading List
ICYMI Colin Kaepernick was named GQ‘s 2017 Citizen of the Year a few weeks ago. In light of this honor two of his closest friends “have compiled a list of ‘Freedom Dream’ resources spanning close to two centuries—including books, essays, films, documentaries, songs, and museums—that can help readers, viewers, and listeners to understand race as the central political, cultural, economic, social, and geographic organizing principle of our nation, past and present. For it is only when we acknowledge the centrality of race in dictating the outcomes of life and death in the United States can we begin to work toward meaningful forms of racial justice.” Find the books, music and movies that helped inspire Kaepernick (and that will enlighten you too) here.
The Deep Also Impacts
Those of you out there who grew up in the 90s will remember that every disaster movie brought a slew of novelizations into bookstores. Even if the movie in question did badly, you knew that at least two adaptations of the script would pop up on shelves. At Hazlitt, Will Sloan wonders if the age of the novelization is over.
Ray Bradbury Passes Away
Ray Bradbury, author of such classics as Fahrenheit 451, has passed away at the age of 91, reports io9. I’ll always remember the first time I read The Veldt (PDF), and being scared out of my adolescent mind.
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