Maria Bustillos dips into David Foster Wallace’s archives, returns with scraps of Wallace’s unpublished writings (including correspondence with his fourth-grade teacher) and insight into his self-help reading.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 . . .
According to Jill Lepore, Longfellow’s much-maligned “Paul Revere’s Ride,” published the day South Carolina seceded from the Union, “was read at the time as a call to arms, rousing northerners to action.”