The great Michael Bierut’s collection of composition notebooks (1982-2008) has me feeling all self-righteous and vindicated for choosing their unfussy functionality over the trendy, overpriced moleskine. Seeing his laid out in rows like that was so inspiring, it almost made me second-guess the practice of ripping out my rough drafts and destroying them as soon as I type the words . . .
“I’m standing in the middle of life/With my past behind me…” Kate Christensen’s writing soundtrack includes Learning to Crawl.
I’m only now learning that Ellen Miller, author of the amazing ’90s junkie novel Like Being Killed, died of a heart attack on December 23 at the age of forty-one. When Ken Foster announced the terrible news a couple weeks ago, he quoted the book’s opening: We crowded around the rickety kitchen table, predicting how each of us would die. . . .
Jill Lepore recalls the first time newspapers were dying, in 1765, after Parliament levied a stamp tax on every printed page in the colonies.
Granta supplements its “Fathers” issue — which includes Lethem, Bechdel, & many more — with a brief piece from Jim Shepard.