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Podcast: Simon Rich Discusses Funny Writing→
This week Simon Rich’s new novella “Sell Out” is being serialized on newyorker.com. It’s the story of Simon Rich’s great-great-grandfather, who falls into a pickle barrel and emerges, one hundred years later, into hipster Brooklyn. On the podcast this week, Rich reads excerpts from the first installment, and then talks with Susan Morrison about the inspiration for his novella, his experiences writing for Saturday Night Live, and his love of the comedic premise, as practiced by Roald Dahl, T. C. Boyle, Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, and others. Listen now: http://nyr.kr/122n043
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Jeremy Denk remembers pianist Charles Rosen, author of “The Classical Style,” who recently passed away: http://nyr.kr/XEI6yK
Photograph from 1969 by Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive/Getty.
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This Week in Fiction: Callan Wink→
Cressida Leyshon discusses the fiction story in this week’s issue, “Breatharians,” with its author, Callan Wink: http://nyr.kr/RucD0b
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Mo Yan and the Power of Movies
In 2005, Mo Yan, who today won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote a remarkable brief memoir for Le Monde (available to the newspaper’s subscribers) in which he described what he calls “an event that I’ve never forgotten and that remains tied to today’s political and social life”—and it was a movie that he saw in 1973, “The Flower Girl,” made in North Korea, directed by Kim Jong-il, based on an opera that was written by Kim Il-sung.
- Richard Brody
Click-through to continue reading.
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Mugglemarch
“There is no part of me that feels that I represented myself as your children’s babysitter or their teacher.”
Ian Parker talks with J.K. Rowling about her life, writing “Harry Potter,” and her new realist novel for adults, “The Casual Vacancy”. Click-through to read.
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Polished Roughhewn
Brad Leithauser reflects on Ernest Hemingway for the third post in a series in which we ask what book or writer our contributors have returned to again and again: http://nyr.kr/OBe3VC
Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty.
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Remembering Mark O'Donnell: "Ohio-Born and Harvard-Frosted"→
Click-through to read Steve O’Donnell’s remembrance of his brother, the playwright and author Mark O’Donnell, who passed away Monday, and for a few of Mark’s humor pieces for the magazine: http://nyr.kr/Nz50T1
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"All biographers act on the hunch that their subject’s lives are worth the effort, but the biographers who focus on obscure subjects act with the romantic faith of the idealistic entrepreneur. Being the first person to take on an unproven subject is both a risk and an investment; you are the entire cottage industry. If your hunch is correct, being there first can bring rewards—no one had written the story of Zelda Fitzgerald when Nancy Milford took it on as a young graduate student; now “Zelda” is a cornerstone of both Fitzgerald and feminist studies. Had Milford been in a position to purchase Zelda’s papers or art work early on she may have found herself in an even more enviable position.
The danger of investing in Dawn Powell, as Page has discovered, is that sheer will alone cannot spark a literary resurgence."— Rachel Syme considers why the diaries of the masterful writer Dawn Powell won’t sell: http://nyr.kr/PKUmdc -
This Week in Fiction: Zadie Smith→
This week’s story, “Permission to Enter,” charts the life of its protagonist, Keisha Blake, and her best friend, Leah Hanwell, neighbors in a housing estate in North West London, from the ages of four to twenty-one. Through a series of numbered vignettes, we watch Keisha’s progression through school and university as she and Leah gradually leave the estate and its expectations behind them.
In this Q. & A., Smith discusses her story: http://nyr.kr/NMmAad
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Get the first glimpse of Malcolm Gladwell’s next book in this video, where Gladwell talks to Nicholas Thompson about the art and science of the underdog: http://nyr.kr/MaTT1N
(Source: newyorker.com)
