Joyce Carol Oates turned 75 years old yesterday, and she’s now writing some of the best fiction of her career.
A Virtuoso at Work by Kevin Frazier
And so despite my esteem for the high challenge of writing, for the reach of the writerly life, it’s not something anyone actually wants me to do. The American mind has made that very clear, it has said: ‘Be a specialised something — fill your head with the zeitgeist, with the technical — and we’ll write your ticket.’
Why are programmers paid so much, and writers paid so little?
“The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text to uncover poems, discovering a network of poems called ‘the Worl’ within the World Wide Web.”
The New Yorker has a sneak peek at some scenes Cormac McCarthy wrote for the forthcoming Ridley Scott film, The Counselor.
“We, like, pretend we don’t, like, know our, like, hips are swiveling or, like, some of us are short so, like, we have to, like, really work our abs, and, like, our boys hold us tight and we smell their, like, deodorant and cologne and, like, sweat and, like, their essence under it all, which is like garlic and like dirt.”
- From “Like,” which is a mesmerizing piece of fiction from Lindsay Hunter.
Two photographers took these images at almost exactly the same time. Year in Reading alum Geoff Dyer explains how their work differs.
How do you describe the life and times of John Horne Burns? He was in turn a military intelligence officer, a schoolteacher, a critical darling after he published The Gallery, a pariah after he published anything else, and a gay man in post-WWII America. In characteristic concision, Ernest Hemingway summed the whole thing up: “There was a fellow who wrote a fine book and then a stinking book about a prep school, and then he just blew himself up.”
PSA: Little Brother is releasing a special issue entitled Everything Is Fine. The kicker? The issue is dedicated to fiction about embattled Toronto mayor Rob Ford. (P.S. If you aren’t familiar with LB, it’s the magazine run by Millions Tumblr-er emeritus Emily M. Keeler.)
Words of wisdom, from Kurt Vonnegut.
Introducing The Vonnegut Review, a telegraphic schizophrenic journey through Vonnegut’s novels. Coming this summer. Stay tuned.
#VonnegutSummer
As summer rolls around, you might way to get acquainted with The Vonnegut Review. Conceived by Wilson Taylor and Matthew Gannon, the review will function as a season-long project “dedicated toward reading and reviewing all fourteen of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels.” You can participate with the Review’s Twitter and Tumblr posts by utilizing the hashtag “#VonnegutSummer.”
Jim Agee: tall, darkly handsome. Prematurely melancholy in a manner both pretentious seeming and deeply real. A great talker, a great (which is to say, bad) drinker, an expert at accentuating or cloaking his southern roots, as occasion demanded. Possessed of as much talent—if by ‘talent’ we mean sheer wattage of verbal combination—as anyone in his generation, a talent that he was on his way either to wasting, if you hold with his latter-day detractors, or to fulfilling, in some necessarily fractured way.
Sit back and get comfortable, because you’ll want to take your time reading all 3,467 of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s words about James Agee, a once-forgotten manuscript, and even an example of “New” Journalism from the 17th century.
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