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Sam Shepard, 1983. Photo: Steve Ringman, SHN   We were sad to learn that Sam Shepard died on Thursday, at age seventy-three. Shepard’s Writers at Work interview  was published in the Spring 1997 issue of The Paris Review . In it, he spoke about endings: The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius. Somebody told me once that  fugue means to flee, so that Bach’s melody lines are like he’s running away. You can read more from the Art of Theater No. 12 with Shepard here . from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2vmruYD

“His writings rarely make it to the US, and are resolutely for an Indian readership. They will win no prizes nor inspire dissertations. But for these reasons they represent the actuality of what many people in the world are reading today, outside of the newly sanctified category of the ‘global novel.’”  Ulka Anjaria for  Public Books on  Chetan Bhagat , “possibly the most successful Indian English novelist ever” and largely unheard of in the west . For more fictional Desi perspectives, read  Aditya Desai in our own pages on reading narratives of Indian women . The post Famous in India appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2udcirN

Anelise Chen is the  Daily ’s “mollusk” correspondent. This week, the mollusk worries about how to maintain barriers in a dissolving world. Camilo Ramirez, Wave.  From the series “The Gulf.”   Growing up in Los Angeles in the early nineties, the mollusk had worried often about acid rain. Spawned in Taiwan, on an island choked with lush, photosynthetic matter, the mollusk had felt most at home among wet, squishy kin. Rain was not yet something to fear; she would play in it alongside the snails and polliwogs who lived in the shallow puddles by her house. But after she moved to LA, there was nothing but cars and smog, which clung in the air like the toxic atmosphere on Venus. Eventually, the mollusk learned that the smog precipitated into acid rain, which—her fourth-grade science teacher said—could sear the hair right off your head. The rain was just as acidic as lemon juice, and it had the power to corrode a car’s expensive paint job! Her teacher always seemed bitterly emphatic on

I’ve recently been seeing more fiction writers like myself turning to video games for inspiration. The ways that books and video games can tell us stories aren’t as different as I used to think. Both require intense concentration and thoughtful interaction, albeit in different ways. Both also insist upon our willingness to escape from the workaday world in order to step into one built word by word or bit by bit by somebody else. Now, with summer fully upon us, it’s time to—however reluctantly—step away from our video games and head to the beach or the local pool. For those gamers willing to put down the controller for a few hours and pick up a book, I’ve compiled a list of five novels that gamers are likely to enjoy. Jason Rekulak’s enjoyable debut novel The Impossible Fortress actually includes a video game. I know that sounds implausible, but each chapter begins with a line of BASIC code. It looks like this: 200 REM *** ESTABLISHING DIFFICULTY *** 210 PRINT “{CLR}{15 CSR DWN}

The final page of Contrapunctus XIV   Learning to play the piano as a kid, I was not especially fond of Bach. I loved Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorák, Brahms. Bach, on the other hand, hurt my head. Bach had to be practiced slowly, evenly, preferably with a metronome, and neither patience nor evenness was my strong suit. The melody was not predictably given to the right hand, but passed from the right to the left and back, split into multiple voices that straddled the staffs, so that at any moment one might simultaneously be playing four or more melodic lines. In the pricey, blue-bound Henle Urtext editions she had insisted I buy, my piano teacher marked with brackets the entrance of each voice. I couldn’t do it myself. If Brahms felt like poetry, Bach felt like math. It was a kind of logic puzzle that I couldn’t solve.  * I struggled with the beginnings of my first novel for several years, as many writers do. I wrote a hundred pages and threw them out, unable to find the story’s shap

Vegetables are generally underrated food items. They are not as fun and flavorful as other culinary favorites like meats and grains. And we sure wouldn’t peg them for being inspirational. But not so for Kenyan writer Gazemba. In a beautiful and detailed account of his journey to becoming a debut novelist, Gazemba reveals that the […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2vfzDgI

Nadifa Mohamed’s NYT review of Jeffery Gettleman’s new book Love, Africa draws attention to the centuries-long misrepresentation of Africa in certain kinds of western narratives. A memoir is an opportunity for a writer to put his or her life on trial, but few follow through and condemn themselves too. Jeffrey Gettleman, this newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning East […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2tRezd1

“For kids to be well-read, they need to be well-fed.”  The New York Times reports on the trend of U.S. libraries providing summer meals to children. The post Feeding Minds and Mouths appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2vXVcAr

The Digital Reader has done us all a solid on this summer Monday and put together a list of five blogs featuring bad book covers .  Now That I’m a Ghost I’m Gay , indeed. The post Not Trolling Can’t Get Mad appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2vl8Wbz

Adolphe François Pannemaker, The Primitive World , 1857. Courtesy of Taschen.   Next month, Taschen will publish  Paleoart: Visions of a Prehistoric Past , an in-depth look at an art form that, by its very nature, imagines—in paintings and engravings, murals and sculptures—the lives of beasts from a bygone age, fusing together fact and fiction, science and whimsy. Culled from private collections, obscure archives, and the collections of natural-history museums, the book’s artwork spans from 1830 to 1990 and was selected by the writer Zoë Lescaze and the artist Walton Ford.  In the essay below, which serves as the book’s preface, Ford writes of his own fascination with paleoart and how the idea for the book came about.  Like many suburban boys in the sixties, I had a childhood infused with images of prehistory. I was obsessed with the stop-motion dinosaurs in the rarely broadcast 1933 movie King Kong , savoring glimpses of their obscure forms through the bluish haze of our rabbit-e

  Soyinka’s recent essay, titled “War In Nigeria: Victory Remains Elusive, 50 Years On,” contains a lot of helpful insights on the Biafra question. Nigeria’s civil war of the late 1960s was re-introduced into the global imagination with the publication Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Chinua Achebe’s last book before his passing also […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2f0wX0A

“I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine.” — Ben Lerner , Leaving the Atocha Station In the creative writing classes I teach, my students—most of them brand new at writing fiction—often go crazy writing plot. Their understanding of fiction, derived from a Stephenie Meyer / J.K. Rowling / Jackie Collins -heavy reading background (not to mention 18 years of TV and movies), is that in fiction, stuff needs to happen.  These early stories are breakneck affairs, full of marriages and divorces and car chases and gunplay and fistfights and murders and suicides and murder-suicides—sometimes spinning several into the same piece.  They are B-movie scripts written as prose, mostly expository. Slow down, I advise, boringly.  They listen, or pretend to listen, as I explain that literary fiction, the kind I am ostensibly being paid to instruct

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO   Gbemiga returned home for the Christmas holiday. Breaking up with Bukky had affected him badly. He loved the girl, but, he didn’t want to go against his family’s wishes. Moreover, his uncles and aunt were willing to sponsor his education. He couldn’t forego such opportunity. In the past, he had asked this … Continue reading Bukky Alakara 32 → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2vkefYN

Recommended Reading:  Paula Marantz Cohen  on  Norman Mailer’s  most infamous book review . The post The Review to End All Reviews appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2uKVFY4

  Marry me he said Marry me I will make you the queen of my heart Marry me I will make you breakfast in bed Marry me and you will be the one after my own heart Marry me and you will be my best friend Marry me and I will take you anywhere for … Continue reading Marry me → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2tOeXZW

I like to believe every individual has that thing that made them change or decide to become a better person, mine is constantly listening to people tell stories of their experience. When you listen closely, you get sayings or quotes from these stories being told. “Never be afraid or too proud to reach out to … Continue reading Better Person → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2vb447V

    There is something immensely enthralling and helplessly entrancing about kissing someone you truly love for the first time. A majestic tranquillity stirs in, and settles placidly on your weary nerves, just as dew descends on leaves on a misty morning. An unabashed sincerity drifts through your lips as they brush against theirs, and … Continue reading Nostalgia → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2vTOBXJ

“Take a quick break from the apocalyptic news and end your week with this list of books to eagerly anticipate (assuming the world doesn’t end) instead!”  The Rumpus lists some books that could make you feel a little bit better. The post Feel Good, Inc appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2w9LxG9

Don’t say there’s something wrong with it, but say something, please; say it’s the best thing you’ve ever heard                                                  since radio waves were first given a voice; say you’d bankrupt the … Continue reading Swell My Empty Head, Please! → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2vTShZI

Our minds have been poisoned and our accepted beliefs are unnatural and artificial.” – Bryant McGill I am not one of those who believe balkanisation would ultimately transform the governments of the nations that emerge from this into El dorados where all the problems facing the people would be resolved magically, as anticipated by some … Continue reading Nnamdi Kanu’s Rhetoric And The Unspoken Realities Of Nigeria’s First Coup. → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2u7cwAP

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE   Bukky and her aunt sat inside the shop counting the money they made that day while the sales girls tidied up the place. “When did you and Chike start dating?” She raised her head and met her aunt’s excited gaze. “A few weeks ago.” She grinned, “I knew that both of you … Continue reading Bukky Alakara 31 → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2eVuep1

From the cover of Wi the haill voice .   Do we need a translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poems into Scots? The late Scottish poet Edwin Morgan would certainly say we do. His belief was that Scots is more suited than English to the “ ‘barbarian lyre’ of the revolutionary spirit” in Mayakovsky’s verse. And I think I agree. Wi the haill voice , a collection of Morgan’s twenty-five translations originally published forty-five years ago, was reissued last year in the UK, and I’ve just discovered it. Scots reads onomatopoeically, reproducing the verve and jump of Mayakovsky’s verse: “Forcryinoutloud! / The starns licht up—aa richt: / does that prove some loon hud to hae it?” I don’t know the language and so used the book’s glossary to perform a second translation (and learned many wonderful words in the process, including grumphie [“pig”] and collieshangie [“squabble”]). But really, it’s more fun to read without meaning, instead feeling the rhythm and energy of the language, which be

Dagmar Godowsky.   What do Sergei Rachmaninoff, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Artur Rubinstein, Sergei Prokofiev, Marlene Dietrich, Igor Stravinsky, and Tallulah Bankhead have in common? Dagmar Godowsky. Once a famous beauty, by the late 1950s Dagmar Godowsky found herself subsisting on caviar, cake, and tales of the past. Typecast as a vamp in the silent-screen era of the early 1920s, she had “hissed her way through a thousand scenes.” She had died by blade, bullet, poison, or strangulation. Yet the demise of silent cinema ended her own film career. Now she performed at the dinner tables of New York’s beau monde. Dagmar Godowsky knew how to busy herself. She always had. Born in 1897 as the daughter of the pianist and composer Leopold Godowsky—known better for his paraphrases of Liszt’s or Schubert’s pieces than his own—Dagmar grew up in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Los Angeles, and New York. Wherever they made their home, her father—a near-maniacal host—collected celebrities. On an