On Friday, June 10, I’ll be discussing the late, great Eudora Welty at Granta’s Truly Yours, Eudora Welty: An Evening on Writing and Influence with editor Patrick Ryan and writer Sheri Holman. Rhonda Keyser will read the job application letter Welty sent to the New Yorker as a young woman, in 1933. “Gentlemen,” it begins, “I suppose you’d be more . . .
“His voice had once been so musical that when he recited passages like, ‘Before Abraham was, I am,’ it must have been nothing short of the sound of God.” Ben Cohen remembers Reynolds Price.
“One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.” — Jamaica Kincaid, who has a novel excerpt out in Little Star
Kate Christensen has an essay in the latest Elle on writing “In a Man’s Voice.” (She’s an expert on the subject; three of her novels, including the upcoming The Astral, have male narrators.) All of you — men not exempted — must read it. Here’s an excerpt: The phrase “dick for a day” used to be bandied about quite a . . .
It would probably be funny if I hadn’t grown up in absolute terror of being Left Behind. Okay, it’s funny anyway, as long as I don’t have to be sober. My latest piece for The Awl is about the convergence of my fortieth birthday and Harold Camping’s predicted May 21 Rapture, but it’s also about a lot more, including fervent . . .