Vulture profiled author Kelly Link, whose story collection White Cat, Black Dog is out later this month.
Link herself is a bit opaque, too. She said she doesn’t enjoy writing and only does it because she finds it “interesting.”
Members of Screaming Females shared a primer to the band’s discography at Bandcamp Daily.
eBooks on sale for $2.99 today:
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison
eBooks on sale for $3.99 today:
The History of the Siege of Lisbon by José Saramago
Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker
Stream a new song by Esther Rose.
The longlist for the International Booker Prize has been announced.
Metallica bought a vinyl pressing plant.
Emily St. John Mandel talked books and reading with ELLE.
Stream a new Everything But the Girl song.
The Millions and Book Riot recommended the week’s best new books.
Stream a new song by Midwife & Vyva Melinkolya.
BuzzFeed recommended spring’s best books.
Stream a new song by Tinariwen.
The curator of a Toni Morrison exhibit at Princeton University discussed the author’s writing process with the Christian Science Monitor.
Also: the new Toni Morrison stamp!
Rebecca Makkai discussed her new novel with Bustle.
“My job is to contract myself within a book, my job is to complicate things,” Makkai says. “I have no patience for black-and-white thinking. The gray area is something that the novel [format] does really well. We read novels for the gray area. We do not read them for a quick, easy moral statement that makes that person feel self-righteous, which is what we do get on Twitter.”
Asale Angel-Ajani discussed her amazing debut novel A Country You Can Leave with The Millions.
I think in fiction there is a greater challenge to appeal to the nuance of the story. To really examine how privilege shows up in people’s lives, in all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I have definitely written about privilege—less through the frame of anthropology and more in the context of Black feminist theory. Black feminist theory, women of color feminist theory, and queer theory have been the most embracing of my own personal experiences, which created the space for the novel—the context of two women who on the surface of things do not have access to traditional forms of privilege. It’s always been important to me to think about how the lines of power and disempowerment blur, intersect, or merge.
DK Nnuru talked to Electric Literature about her debut novel What Napoleon Could Not Do.
3:AM Magazine shared an excerpt from Christiana Spens’s memoir The Fear.
Shondaland profiled Margaret Atwood.
“I’m not a prophet,” she says. “No, no, no, no, no, no, probably because I know too much about what happens to prophets. [It’s] not always good.” Atwood proclaims she’s simply been paying attention.
The 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize shortlist has been announced.
Congratulations to Largehearted Boy contributor Arinze Ifeakandu.
LitReactor shared a conversation between debut novelists Juan Martinez and Eden Robins.
Sandra Simonds talked to Full Stop about her debut novel Assia.
I knew I wanted to write a novel, something that wasn’t poetry, and I was looking for a subject, and then when I read about Assia—she’s sort of traditionally depicted as this mistress figure, she doesn’t have much personality, she’s kind of a stock character in that whole story, which is that she’s the destroyer of the marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.