It’s James Salter Month at The Paris Review. Kate Peterson interviews him, and Geoff Dyer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Porochista Khakpour, Ian Crouch, and other writers offer appreciations in the lead-up to the annual Spring Revel, where he’ll be honored.
Binnie Kirshenbaum is estranged from her elderly father, who lives in an assisted living facility with an elderly cat. She sends food baskets from Katz’s deli and imagines what his life will be like if the cat dies first.
Maria Bustillos dips into David Foster Wallace’s archives, returns with scraps of Wallace’s unpublished writings (including correspondence with his fourth-grade teacher) and insight into his self-help reading.
My friend Alexi Zentner discusses his strategies for balancing fabulism and realism in his first novel, Touch. At Bookslut, Courtney Tenz compares his writing to Per Petterson’s.
Thanks to Jonathon Green’s magnificent three-volume Dictionary of Slang, which arrived yesterday compliments of Oxford University Press, I’ve already learned that the first recorded use of “bad shag” dates to 1788, that to “beat skin”* (1944) doesn’t mean what you think, you pervert, and that the term “dude” was once (1883) considered so offensive that “a vigorous Bloomington woman cowhided . . .