It has not always been so, but few aspects of online aspiring-writer culture are more irritating to me than “literary lifestyle” tips and paraphernalia. (Library-scented perfume. Dictionary wallpaper. Moleskines. Bookshelves fashioned of reference books pulled from library dumpsters. The onslaught is maddening.) But every curmudgeon is at least something of a hypocrite, and I am no exception. I visit writers’ . . .
Louisa May Alcott wrote what she called “moral pap for the young” for the money. She also published edgy pulp, and Civil War hospital dispatches.
James Salter, who reviews a new book on Sullenberger and US Airways flight 1549, once crash-landed a plane, himself. (Via.)
“‘In his lovemaking I now think there was an autistic quality.’” Jonathan Dee contemplates Coetzee’s latest experiment in memoir, and the “‘feeling of a writer deforming his medium.’”
A Chinese court has sentenced poet, professor, and dissident Liu Xiaobo to eleven years in prison.