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Join NOW!The early skepticism for The End of the Tour may have been misguided. David Poland caught up with James Ponsoldt (the film’s director) and Donald Marguiles (its Pulitzer-winning screenwriter) to touch on Wallaces’s legacy, the Lipsky interview, and the process behind what’s since been deemed a “glorious casting.”
...moreJoshua Mohr tackles time, addiction, and invisible dogs over at Lit Hub: I’d love to tell you what happened next with the Rattler, love to tell you some adventure I went on with him. But the truth is I can’t tell you anything else. One minute I was sitting at Vesuvio nursing a Fernet shot, […]
...moreTa-Nehisi Coates continues to storm the literary world over at Rolling Stone and New York Magazine, and if those accolades weren’t enough, Toni Morrison has decreed him to “fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died.”
...more(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) In which Obama becomes the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. In which the debate over Common Core leads to more than 42,000 Washington 11th graders boycotting. In which the Hispanic population of New Orleans […]
...more(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) In galactic news, now we know what Pluto looks like. Ever wonder where all the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge money went? Two men film themselves holding hands on a walk through Moscow. Hit an inconvenient red light […]
...more(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) In a month of historic progressions, the US, Iran, and six other nations have reached a nuclear deal. Donald Trump and the noted Mexican kingpin ‘El Chapo’ discuss metaphysics over Twitter. A look at the giant fault line […]
...more(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) In the best news ever for someone yet to be determined, J.K. Rowling has announced an open casting call for her Harry Potter spin-off. The Boy Scouts of America have (finally) unanimously approved a resolution allowing gay adults to […]
...moreOver at BOMB, A.L. Stein sits down with Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts, to chat about metaphysics, attachments, and her relationship with the normative: “The normative/transgressive dichotomy is so deep. I remember a student I had a while ago, a trans person deeply invested in anti-assimilation, who was saying to me quite plaintively one […]
...moreJami Attenberg schools Travel and Leisure on the nuance of New Orleans, noting that “for a boisterous city, New Orleans can be awfully quiet when you need it to be.”
...more(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) For the second time in as many arrests, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman has escaped from prison though an underground tunnel. Donald Trump again enlightens the public with his overwhelming inclusivity. If you’re looking for morning grooves, Tame […]
...moreOver at the New Yorker, Alejandro Zambra has a piece of post-fiction prose from his collection Facsímil; it’s a parody on the entire notion of education. Read Zambra’s thoughts on the piece, and the collection, here.
...moreSarah Gerard interviews Ottesa Moshfegh for Hazlitt—among other concessions, Moshfegh admits that she’s “not from this dimension”: I’m like an alien in a human body. I come from a different place, a different plane of existence. I can’t explain that other place because I don’t know it in this lifetime, I don’t have memories of it, but I know […]
...moreIn an essay reprinted over at Longreads, Alexander Chee looks back on finishing his MFA, moving back to New York, and the interiority of class that cater-waitering allowed him to peek into: In 1997, I began working as a waiter for William F. and Pat Buckley. I was the picture of a New York cater-waiter: […]
...moreOver at the New Yorker, James Wood chronicles Alejandro Zambra’s ascent in Latin American letters.
...moreAs it turns out, Aleksandar Hemon jams out to D’angelo, Grimes, and Fela Kuti; for the rest of the tunes the writer put on his playlist for The Making of Zombie Wars, head over to Largehearted Boy.
...moreElisa Gabbert asks the hard questions for Electric Literature: When the VIDA counts come out and multiple publications are shown to publish far more men than women (with the numbers for POC writers looking even worse), editors make excuses about their submission pools – they get far more submissions and pitches from men than women. Then people […]
...moreOf course Zadie Smith’s written a science fiction epic, set on September 11, 2001, chronicling the haphazard relationship between Marlon Brando, Michael Jackson, and Elizabeth Taylor. And of course it’s based on a true story, or at least an urban myth, supported by textual evidence, that she just felt the need to fill in the […]
...moreOver at WBUR, Radio Open Source calls their program “an American conversation with a global attitude.” The podcast touches on everything from first-reads with James Wood, to Knausgaard on literary mechanics, to Pakistan’s regrettable American marriage in wake of Osama Bin Laden—and for all their worldliness, they’re located right at home. With Christopher Lydon as […]
...moreNearly a decade ago, Binvayanga Wainaina wrote an essay for Granta that changed his whole life. Now, he looks at the interior of African publishing, the landscape of literature on the continent, and the “Nollywoodification of the book market”: “I am least interested about how Europe, the West, represents Africa. The essay I wrote – ‘How to […]
...moreAt BuzzFeed, Mat Johnson breaks down the logistics of an oft-ignored, always tumultuous descriptor for multiethnic folks everywhere: I know that many people, they hear mulatto, and they think of the word mule. This is often the first complaint I hear about mulatto: that it derives from the hybrid product of breeding a donkey with a […]
...moreOver at the Paris Review, Brit Bennett profiles the role, or lack thereof, of black dolls among Americans today: Of course, you can still buy racist dolls. Golliwogs—blackfaced rag dolls—are still sold in the United Kingdom; only in 2009 were they finally removed from a gift shop on the Queen’s Sandringham Estate. Pickaninny dolls, racist […]
...moreOver at Vice, Julian Morgans gets a hold of Tim Jacobus, the guy behind R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series’ book covers. Their conversation touches on prog rock, horror’s allure, and the literary merit of the little horror novels: Well, they’re not Thoreau, but they’re good. And they got a lot of kids reading who would have otherwise […]
...moreSergio Pitol gets the profile treatment over at Lit Hub: Sergio Pitol (1933) is all of the above; he is, I believe, a total writer. And by writer I do not mean one of those intellectuals who flirt with power (“The difference between who I am now and who I was then is defined by my […]
...moreOver at the Atlas Review, Natalie Eilbert drops in on Valeria Luiselli in Harlem: I sometimes teach Spanish to a lot of undergraduates at Columbia, which is something that I love. It gives me the illusion, hopefully not a delusion, that more and more young people are learning Spanish going on to professions that perhaps […]
...moreKazuo Ishiguro is interviewed at the Los Angeles Review of Books; among other things, the writer touches on world-building, jumping genres, and why, sometimes, it takes a little while to get where you’re going: Well, it took me four years or five years before I came up with my second novel, and that wasn’t a strategy, that was […]
...moreNicholas Lemann breaks down America’s social castes at the New York Review of Books.
...moreLongreads gifts us newly translated fiction from Antonio Tabucci: He must be almost ninety, he spends his afternoons gazing out the window at New York’s skyscrapers, a Puerto Rican girl comes each morning to tidy up his apartment, she brings him a dish from Tony’s Café that he reheats in the microwave, and after he […]
...moreValeria Luiselli previews The Story of My Teeth for BOMB Magazine; among the dentures being optioned are G.K. Chesterton’s, Virginia Woolf’s, Charles Lamb’s, Rousseau’s, and the fangs of Mr. Montaigne.
...moreDown at Texas Monthly, Domingo Martinez riffs on South Padre’s (regrettable) legacy: Now, spring break in South Texas is not what it is elsewhere. Here it’s less a quantifiable series of days on a calendar before you return to class than an excusable period of depravity and a gold mine for those invested in the […]
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