April 19, 2013 On the Shelf Close Reading, and Other News By Sadie Stein A sly French literacy campaign wins international plaudits. (Look again: that’s it right there!) Writers mobilize to save Venice’s bookshops. Sadly, Portland’s Murder by the Book is meeting an unkinder fate. “When she went to New York [from Boston], she wasn’t thinking about the work she was going to do—she was thinking about the clothes she was going to wear.” Sylvia Plath’s month at Mademoiselle, an experience that would figure in The Bell Jar. Well, this was clearly never going to bother anyone: “10 Talented Female Authors I Wouldn’t Kick Out of Bed for Writing About Crackers.” (He has a type.)
April 18, 2013 Bulletin Help Wanted By Sadie Stein We were extremely intrigued by the following classified, which advertises work for a “writer and editor.” Watson Adventures seeks a writer and editor of cultural scavenger hunts. Must have excellent sense of humor, fanatical attention to detail, slavish devotion to deadlines. Must be flexible and a team player, with good interpersonal skills. Please send published examples of your writing and 3 examples of hunt questions suitable for our style of hunt. Full time, salary $40k per year, plus health insurance, 401k plan, optional dental. Send resume and clips to [email protected]. Guessing there are a few qualified applicants at my alma mater.
April 18, 2013 At Work An Enormous Amount of Pictures: In the Studio with Miriam Katin By Yevgeniya Traps Miriam Katin’s first book, We Are On Our Own, told the story of her escape, as a child, from the Nazi invasion of Budapest. An attempt to come to terms with her past, to reconcile faith and history, and an elegantly stark tribute to her mother, that graphic memoir was also a beautifully realized work of art. The story it told, retained all the wonder and pain of a child’s impressions, tempered by experience and wisdom. In her new book, Letting It Go, Katin grapples with her son Ilan’s decision to move to Berlin, a city she identifies with Nazis. An investigation of the price survival exacts, it is also an unabashedly personal investigation of family dynamics, a sequel of sorts to We Are On Our Own. On a recent March afternoon, I visited Katin, who bears an uncanny resemblance to her cartoon-self, in her Washington Heights apartment, her home for the past twenty-two years and the site of her studio in what used to be her son’s room. She made tea for me and coffee for herself, set out a plate of freshly baked, sugar-dusted cookies, and, with a softly melodious Hungarian accent, recounted the process of working on her books, her feelings about contemporary Berlin, her nine-year-stint living on a kibbutz, her love of the city (“I’m an asphalt flower. Nature is okay, it’s good. But I like asphalt,” she said), and what it was like to be the oldest employee at MTV, where she worked on Beavis and Butthead and Daria. The first book stood on its own, a story from A to Z, a start and a finish. Now this story, this new book, is so personal. And it really depends on the first one. I think it would be hard, just getting to it, to say, That’s interesting. It’s more fragmented and extremely personal. And vulgar. And dirty. I didn’t hold anything back. Read More
April 18, 2013 On the Shelf Poets Without Clothes, and Other News By Sadie Stein Talk about truth in advertising: meet Poets Without Clothes. [NSFW] Check out this nifty animation of a 1996 DFW interview. George Orwell’s northern Indian birthplace is being turned into a memorial … for Gandhi. What are libraries doing with old books? Lots of things. Pew: “About seven in ten of those who used a library over a twelve-month period did so to borrow print books or to browse the shelves.”
April 17, 2013 Nostalgia If Heavy, Then Lift By Alia Akkam Every morning, I would start the day with the Smashing Pumpkins—haunting “Disarm,” anthemic “Today.” Over and over, in a bedroom still mired in childhood, where a mound of carelessly tossed stuffed animals crept up my white wood dresser, I relentlessly played Siamese Dream. This, I thought, is how one becomes a teenager. When the sun was at its hottest, late in the afternoon, I would stand at my front door, forehead pressed against the mesh screen, waiting for some friend’s mother to pull up in a beige Nissan and carry us to the mall. Here, I would spend hours in too-short shorts in too-cold air conditioning deliberating between pungent Plumeria or Freesia lotions at Bath & Body Works, scarfing down greasy slices of food-court pizza, and buying a hideous glittery cropped tee my mother would take one look at and matter-of-factly proclaim I would never wear. Until I was called for dinner, I’d read Seventeen, wondering if, once my dreaded braces came off, I’d be as beautiful as the young girls staring back at me with their wisps of charcoal eyeliner rimming their almond-shaped eyes, the ones who looked like they hadn’t cried since they fell off pretty pink bicycles with white baskets and streamers flowing from the handlebars. After that night’s iteration of chicken and rice, the phone would ring. For the next hour and a half, I would talk about nothing with the person I had had nothing to say to at the mall just a few hours before. It was the summer of 1993, and I was bored. Read More