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The Loneliest Whale In The Ocean
Somewhere in the Pacific ocean, a whale of unprecedented size is swimming around and calling out to other whales, with no response. This is the “52 Blue” whale, subject of worldwide devotion and fascination and a beautiful new essay on being alone from Leslie Jamison. You can (and should!) read an excerpt on Slate. One marine-mammal…
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Missed Connection: White Teeth
Scenario: you are on the train, you are sitting across from a man in a baseball cap reading, say, White Teeth, and in a matter of seconds you’ve visualized an entire literary life with him (the next stop, he gets off, and that future crumbles). If this sounds familiar, or if you’re just a sucker…
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The Last Laugh
Memoirist (and former editor-at-large of McSweeney’s) Sean Wilsey talks to The Atlantic about his essay collection, More Curious, and why humor writing resonates: I think there’s something dishonest about writing that isn’t funny. I can’t engage with a piece of work without an element of humor to it. Laughter and levity are important aspects of human life, even at its darkest,…
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Rereading James Baldwin
Teju Cole has a long, staggeringly (good, sharp, dynamic, crushing) essay in The New Yorker about rereading James Baldwin’s Stranger In The Village: American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending…
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Working in A Public Space (of sorts)
The CLMP blog interviews the staff of literary magazine, A Public Space, for a nice, succinct take on what it’s like to be a contemporary lit editor. Contains: public confusion on the term “a public space”, answers to the age-old “is social media destroying everything?” question, and alternate career aspirations of the staff.
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The Bookstores Will Survive
A bright spot in the midst of all the back-and-forth in the Amazon battle—Kate Brittain, at The Morning News, writes about the state of independent bookstores: I began my search in a nervous mood. But as I entered name after name into the database, wandering virtually into every store I could discover between our shining seas, I…
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Walking Along Brighton Beach
As soon as Ashley came down the stairs from the subway, which rattles across a bridge over Brighton Beach Avenue, it all came tumbling out: who he really was and that he was married. Every time a train passed overhead it drowned out what he was saying and he would have start over. Short, but…
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Giving Up The Giver
What is it like to hand your award-winning young adult novel over to Hollywood, 21 years after it was written? Lois Lowry talks to the New York Times about the forthcoming film adaption of The Giver.
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The Rumpus Interview with Francesca Lia Block
Francesca Lia Block discusses her passion for writing twenty-five years after her iconic debut, Weetzie Bat, her propensity for hypergraphia, and the value of a supportive editor.
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For Sale: John Cheever’s Magical Suburban Home
Alexander Nazaryan’s Newsweek essay about John Cheever’s home (for sale, in Ossining) is more than a real estate ad; it’s a beautiful homage to the suburbanite writer. Upon touring the house with Susan, Cheever’s daughter, Nazaryan writes: I kept asking the one question obviously worth asking—What was it like here?—and she kept wracking her mind and returned…
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Short Stories for Aliens
Do aliens, once in love, ever break up? You’d have to hope so. It would be kind of creepy, all these aliens living monogamously to like age 9,000, making love in that slow, telepathic way they have. And afterward, they do that “brain meld” thing and put their “teeth” back in. Eek. Let’s give him…
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Away, But Not Away
How can writers get a room of their own, literally or figuratively? In Away, an essay in the summer issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Roxana Robinson writes about carving out private space in the midst of being over-saturated by the world around you: You can call it a blessing, I suppose: You’re never bored. You’re always interested…