The inimitably incisive Steve Almond rips Romney’s “truth problem” a new one.
And here, the freaky Almond interviews the freakier Jennifer Spiegel, author of The Freak Chronicles, on The Nervous Breakdown.
Speaking of which: Are you a Mary Gaitskill freak like me? Check out the (yep, overusing the word freaky here, but man this time it fits) excerpt from her new novel, The Devil’s Treasure, over at Electric Literature. Cool artistic “Single Sentence Animation” trailer on the site, too.
“When anyone claims they aren’t a feminist, I assume they don’t know what they’re talking about.” –MariNaomi. Word. This is classic.
I’m tardy in linking Emily Rapp’s staggering essay, “Someone to Hold Me,” in Salon. Seriously, I don’t know another contemporary writer dissecting mortality, grief and desire with the luminosity and passion Rapp brings. This woman writes like an oracle. A must-read.
Abby Mims’ blunt piece on her old MFA rivalry with Joshua Ferris, “Et tu, Nemesis?,” stirs some controversy over on The Nervous Breakdown. I’m not sure I “get” literary rivalries, per se. One person’s success doesn’t make yours any less or more likely. But I sure do get that people sometimes rub each other the wrong way in workshops. And that raw honesty, even when it doesn’t make you look pretty, is part of the writer’s job. So this was interesting to me.
I’m not sure I’ve ever rapturously underlined so many lines in a novel as I did when I first read Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, in Morocco, in 1997. Yet there’s something slightly purple about Durrell, too, right? This Bookslut piece on Durrell’s legacy, on his centenary, is pretty fascinating.
Ray Bradbury’s biographer, Sam Weller’s, moving tribute to his friend and mentor on HuffPo.
What if you do judge a book by its cover? This is (freaking) hilarious.
