Round-Up: Robert Pirsig, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Open-Source Textbooks
From the passing of Robert Pirsig to new initiatives to benefit college students, here’s the latest literary news.
Blog
Small-Town Life: Polish Edition
It’s obvious on the page that Springer has fallen in love with the town, with its story. Some chapters read like a brochure for a place that no longer exists.
The Writer Tax
A new tax reform blueprint offers some sense of where the Administration wants to take tax policy—and what it means for writers.
“A Novel in Poetry”: An Interview With Dr. Mutlu Konuk Blasing and Poet Randy Blasing
I had the honor of speaking with Dr. Mutlu Konuk Blasing and Randy Blasing, the formidable translators of Nazım Hikmet. The Blasings have translated six books of Hikmet’s poetry together, and on their own they have a long record of contributions to scholarship and poetry.
The Shifting Language of Violence
It is more or less the recognition of the less-than-subtle hint that the violence ensued upon each other cycles back onto the faulting, failing, incriminating treatment of our one true home.
The Problem with Writing Autism as Problem
To try to capture the zeitgeist of autism in America right now is to sip water from a fire hose. It can’t be done. The diagnosis is as contentious as it is, increasingly, commonplace, claimed as everything from epidemic to evolution. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at autism through a variety of lenses, both clinical and personal, but the lens that intrigues me most is that of the novelist.
Character Through the Portraits of Alice Neel
Almost everything I know about character development, I learned by studying the portraits of Alice Neel, who painted portraits in the mid-20th century at a time when the art world considered portrait painting nearly irrelevant.
Review: SCRATCH: WRITERS, MONEY, AND THE ART OF MAKING A LIVING edited by Manjula Martin
Scratch, a collection of interviews and essays from writers spanning the gamut of genre, commercial success, race, gender, and class, boasts pieces from Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, Yiyun Li, Porochista Khakpour, and Jonathan Franzen. Topics range from the gritty details of checks and debts to a philosophical pondering of money, art, livelihood, and lifestyle.
The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: Silence and the Self in Joan Didion’s Southern California Memoir
Joan Didion’s 1979 book of essays The White Album is not only a road trip through the gridded streets and indecisive canyons of Los Angeles County, but also a meditation on Southern California as a setting for self-discovery.