DAVID SEDARIS is the author of thirteen books, most recently Happy-GoLucky (2022) and The Best of Me (2020), both published by Little, Brown. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, CBS Sunday Morning, and BBC Radio 4. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Jonathan Swift International Prize for Satire and Humor, and the Terry Southern Prize for Humor.
I WAS in Central Park one afternoon, tying my shoe, when two sparrows landed on the back of a nearby bench. A child seated not far away noticed them as I and said to the woman I assumed was her nanny, "Look, they're friends!"
It's what a kid would say. Honestly, though, how close could the two birds be when their survival meant competing for the same meager crumbs? It's like that with writers, too, and it's the reason I hang out with so few of them. When my old friend Ted tells a funny or interesting story and I laugh at it, he's pleased. When a writer tells an interesting story, they'll most often follow it with, "I'm already using that."
It's why I spend time with laypeople, mainly graphic designers for some reason. When I do meet other authors, I tend to steer them toward shoptalk. The publishing business has changed drastically since my first collection, Barrel Fever, was released in 1994. It used to be you'd fly to, say, Kansas City on a book tour and be interviewed on a local NPR culture show. Those are gone for the most part, as is the arts coverage in so many newspapers. Now it's mainly podcasts. "This one's about cooking," I'll be told.
"Yes," I'll say to my publicist. "But mine is not a cookbook."
"Okay, but you eat, right?"
Denne historien er fra September - October 2022-utgaven av Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Denne historien er fra September - October 2022-utgaven av Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
THE MEUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY
READING The Museum of Human History felt like listening to a great harmonic hum. After I finished it I found the hum lingering in my ears. Its echo continued for days.
The Sea Elephants
SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
The History of a Difficult Child
MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
The Sorrows of Others
AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
The Fine Print
HOW TO READ YOUR BOOK CONTRACT
First
GINA CHUNG'S SEA CHANGE
Blooming how she must
WITH ROOTS IN NATURE WRITING, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, POETRY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY, CAMILLE T. DUNGY'S NEW BOOK, SOIL: THE STORY OF A BLACK MOTHER'S GARDEN, DELVES INTO THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL ACT OF CULTIVATING AND DIVERSIFYING A GARDEN OF HERBS, VEGETABLES, FLOWERS, AND OTHER PLANTS IN THE PREDOMINANTLY WHITE COMMUNITY OF FORT COLLINS, COLORADO.