TOBI'S DESK

Michael Paterniti. Photo: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey. Earlier this month, I visited family on Cliff Island, off the coast of Portland, Maine. It’s a lovely place, with pebbled beaches and raspberry bushes. And it’s small. Very, very small. The whole island is about two miles from end to end; the total population, according to the most recent U.S. census, is sixty-one. There are no cars or restaurants or hotels. People get around on foot or bike, or with the occasional golf cart. But what Cliff Island does have is a library—and a great one. Run out of an old house and open for only a few hours a day, the Cliff Island Library contains a large and eclectic selection of books, many of which have been collected over the years by the island’s residents or else donated by tourists passing through. On my aunt’s recommendation, I picked up Love and Other Ways of Dying , a delightfully strange and sensitive essay collection by the journalist Michael Paterniti. Paterniti’s writing defies trad...

It comes full circle. In 2004, the popular Nigerian journalist Funmi Iyanda invited a man to her talk show, New Dawn with Funmi. During that interview, the man, Bisi Alimi, came out as gay. It invoked the wrath of Nigerians, not only on him but on Iyanda for daring to use her platform that way. […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2NMQKQa

“The nice thing about talking to undergrads is that they are not stressed out yet about publication…Their love is still pure, and it’s very energizing.” For Lithub , R.O. Kwon talks to Maris Kreizman about book tours at colleges, losing religion, and her novel, The Incendiaries , now out in paperback. Pair with Kwon’s excellent Year in Reading entry from a couple years back. The post R.O. Kwon Takes Faith Seriously appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions https://ift.tt/34dNu6o

  Had I not been a writer, I would have liked to be a singer, a parrot, a spy, or a neurosurgeon. Unfortunately, the only singing I do is in the shower, I only ever fly in economy class, and the closest I’ve come to espionage or brain surgery was when I dressed up as a doctor back in my college days, to sneak into the National Medical Center. Donning a white coat I bought on the black market, each Tuesday I greeted the hospital guards with Hippocratic aplomb, and made for the language therapy room, where treatment was offered to aphasia patients, whose brain injuries impaired their ability to speak. In those days I was more interested in neurons than people, but in that somber room, shielded by a white coat, I began to find my way back to literature. Not long ago, I discovered a striking coincidence: thirty years earlier, my father also dressed up as a doctor to sneak into the same hospital, with a different purpose: to visit his older brother who had lung cancer, and slip him p...

The Irish writer Kevin Barry is no stranger to literary laurels. His debut novel, City of Bohane (2011), won the European Union Prize for Literature and the IMPAC Dublin Award. His two collections of short stories have been awarded the Rooney Prize and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. His second novel, Beatlebone (2015), won the Goldsmiths Prize. Now Barry is out with a wicked little rabbit-punch of a novel, Night Boat to Tangier , that’s on the longlist for this year’s prestigious Booker Prize. From his home in County Sligo, Ireland, Barry spoke by phone recently with The Millions staff writer Bill Morris . The Millions: The last time we spoke, you were in New York flogging your novel Beatlebone . Remember? Kevin Barry: Yes, of course, in Washington Square Park. October of 2015 it would have been. TM: I remember a couple of things about that day, Kevin. First of all, we talked about places, and you said your books come from the reverberations given off by a place, and...

By the time I went to school, I knew the world was changeable the way people were changeable, especially people like parents, with their moods and regrets and sore shoulders. Over the winter holidays, the world was lit by little yellow bulbs on garlands. There was the peacefulness of surprises that would come and that would not be terribly surprising: our stockings always held one orange, one apple, and a pack of chewing gum, along with something else like stickers or brand-new socks. In the car, the world grew purposeful; at the dollar theater, where our dad could take us to see The Princess Bride on a Tuesday afternoon for fifty cents apiece, the world grew relaxed. Swimming pools turned the world glamorous. Every year my sister and I would look forward to the afternoon when Tulsa’s public pools would open. The pools hosted block parties with free sandwiches served in a long, perfect row, like the world’s biggest snake just lurking in the shadows, and even free cups of pop, which ...

The story “Foxes,” from my collection Black Light , took me more than a dozen years to write. It was the last story I turned in to my editor at Vintage in 2018, though it was the very first one I started, back in my first semester of Columbia’s MFA fiction program in 2005. In those days, the story was called, “The Teeth,” and later, “The Tent,” and later still, “Foxes Know How Near the Hunters.” Some components have remained the same across every iteration: a troubled child brings their troubled mother into a living room tent they’ve fashioned from barstools, sheets, and blankets. The child holds the mother captive in the flashlit space, sometimes with stories told aloud, sometimes with shadow puppets cast on the walls of the tent. The child has always had bad teeth. The mother has always spoken in a formal tone, has always been a little afraid of the child. But why was the mother afraid? And how exactly were these characters troubled? I wasn’t always sure. There were other big, cruci...

Illustration from Little Women , 1869. Courtesy of Houghton Library at Harvard University. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. In the first chapter of Little Women , when Louisa May Alcott is doling out archetypes to the siblings, Beth asks, “If Jo is a tomboy and Amy a goose, what am I, please?” “You’re a dear,” Meg answers, “and nothing else.” People who have studied anything about Little Women know that the novel is based, roughly, on Louisa’s family, a clan of thinkers, artists, and transcendentalists who rubbed elbows with some of the premier minds of their time: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller. Beth is no exception; she is based on Alcott’s second-youngest sister, Lizzie. Lizzie, like Beth, was stricken with scarlet fever. (During this initial illness, her family—vegans and believers in alternative medicine—did not send for a doctor.) Like Beth, she recovered from the illness but, her heart weakened, never regained full health. Like Beth, she di...

The Dead Rabbits moniker dates back to a 19th-century New York street gang, but it’s about to have a major resurgence in the form of a new literary press, Dead Rabbits Books —itself a spinoff of New York’s Dead Rabbits Reading Series , founded in 2014 by writers Devin Kelly , Katie Rainey , and Katie Longofono , who met while attending the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College. Brian Birnbaum pitched the idea for Dead Rabbits Books to Rainey, his domestic (and now business) partner, in 2018, following a litany of failed attempts (including a near-miss) to publish his debut novel, Emerald City . After roping in software engineer Jon Kay , the trio decided to make Emerald City their inaugural title. (They have also announced upcoming titles by David Hollander , Annie Krabbenschmidt , and Rainey.) The trio wanted to use Birnbaum’s novel to launch the press before asking any other authors to trust them with their work. But Birnbaum also took particular inspiration from Sergio De La Pava...