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From Stephen Elliott
Via Longreads, a Michigan Quarterly Review essay by Miah Arnold about teaching creative writing to children hospitalized with (often terminal) cancer.
Reading it feels like having your heart thrown off a skyscraper, but it’s so good you have to read it through a second time.
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I don’t remember what I was doing when my aunt called to tell me my father was dying.
A memoir of life as a disappointed fan becomes a meditation on “isolation and the things we do to overcome our loneliness… emptiness, and not knowing how to fill it.”
In Jami Attenberg’s new novel, a woman flees her comfortable life and finds a mixed bag of possibilities in Sin City.
Loss and longing sit side-by-side with unexpected humor in Laura van den Berg’s stories, reminding readers of the strange things we encounter every day.
Tinkers is a novel steeped in, and obsessed with, minutiae. Whether describing the inner workings of a clock, the network of ducts and wires that runs through a home, or the contents of a salesman’s cart, Paul Harding seems to constantly hold a jeweler’s loupe up to the reader’s eye.
The Cancer Patients Aid Association has new ads featuring Stalin and Hitler, their point being that smoking kills many more people than ruthless dictators. The only problem is their numbers are horrifically off. Hitler, for example, is responsible for a lot more than six million deaths.