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Every now and then, Anthony Lane, The New Yorker movie critic, will go in for the YA kill. He did it here, in his review of the movie "If I Stay," based on the Gayle Forman novel. And he did it again, just a few weeks ago, in his review of "The Fifth Wave."

I quote:

"The film is directed by J. Blakeson and adapted—though perhaps not adapted enough—from the novel by Rick Yancey. In other words, we are in the belly of young-adult fiction: a marketing wheeze dressed up as an art form...."

We have to hand it to Lane for the crisp cleverness of his phraseology. But I think we also have to ask: Is marketing wheeze how the YA category began, what it now is, what it is becoming, or simply an easy (outmoded) mode of attack?

The only way to defend this category from future Lane-isms is to write our stories unclassifiably well.

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The New Yorker writers have selected their favorite books of 2015.

The list includes recommendations from Joshua Rothman, Jennifer Gonnerman, Ben Marcus, Rebecca Mead, Amanda Petrusic, Daniel Mendelsohn, Vinson Cunningham, Elif Batuman, Alexandra Schwartz, Rachel Kushner, Hua Hsu, Judith Thurman, Alexis Okeowo, Lauren Collins, Nick Paumgarten, Carrie Battan, and Ben Lerner.

The list includes 49 book recommendations ranging from fiction and nonfiction to memoirs and graphic novels.

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Ever wonder how cartoons REALLY get into the New Yorker? Tonight Very Semi-Serious: A Partially Thorough Portrait of New Yorker Cartoonists debuts on HBO after a brief theatrical run. Directed by Leah Wolchok, it’s a full length documentary that follow the New Yorker’s Bob Mankoff and staff on the cartoon rounds. If you enjoy seeing […]

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The New Yorker has launched a new digital program to showcase long-form fiction called New Yorker Novella. The fiction editors of the publication will edit the pieces.

The first novella being featured, entitled In Hindsight, comes from writer Callan Wink. It will also appear in Cressida Leyshon’s forthcoming short story collection entitled Dog Run Moon.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece: “Lauren followed the drag mark for a mile down the gravel road and then another half mile down her dusty driveway and then parked her truck and cried. The bastard had shot one of her steers—one of six, red Texas longhorns—and dragged it down the road by its neck and deposited it here for her to find, practically on her front step.”

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"Author tours should not be confused with the rock-and-roll variety. Where bands face a baying throng in a cavernous stadium, writers drone through random chunks of their work at the rear of provincial bookstores, signing copies in the faint hope that the newly enhanced volumes will not appear on eBay before breakfast."

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, reviewing "The End of the Tour"

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Can reading books help with stress management? In a piece published in The New Yorker, social anthropologist and author Ceridwen Dovey talked about her experiences with bibliotherapy.

This form of psychological treatment encourages reading to promote healing. This practice has been conducted in a variety of settings from literature courses for incarcerated individuals to reading circles for elderly dementia patients.

Here’s more from the article: “For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why and how is now becoming clearer, thanks to new research on reading’s effects on the brain. Since the discovery, in the mid-nineties, of ‘mirror neurons’—neurons that fire in our brains both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see an action performed by someone else—the neuroscience of empathy has become clearer. A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology, based on analysis of fMRI brain scans of participants, showed that, when people read about an experience, they display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves.”

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There are a lot of ways to stay safe as a writer: by not writing, by writing to no one, by writing to a single admirer, by challenging the judgment of those with the power to judge, by not putting much effort into your work. "It's hard," Zink writes in "The Wallcreeper," trying to defend your territory and advertise your presence and keep out of predators' line of sight."

—Kathryn Schulz, "Outside In," The New Yorker, May 18, 2015 edition, in a story about the writer Nell Zink

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Tomorrow evening I'll be down at Penn, at Kelly Writers House, participating in a 7-Up program that promises to be provocative. The theme is mental health and literature. The evening, a Junior Fellows Program, was knit together (so ably) by Hannah White. You can find more about the evening below, and of course you are welcome to come.

In trying to develop a presentation that fits within the given seven minute boundaries, I'm aware of all that I won't have time to say about the medical research and stories that have been released in the months after I finished writing One Thing Stolen, a novel that has a rare neurodegenerative condition—frontotemporal dementia, primary progressive aphasia—at its heart.

(Generally speaking, FTD is a category of conditions brought on by the "progressive degeneration of the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain." Some patients afflicted with the "language subtypes" of FTD erupt with new artistic capabilities—a sign, it is thought, of a brain attempting to compensate for those parts of the brain that are no longer working as they once were.)

I would like, then, to summarize four key stories here—stories that validate the hope that readers will find in the final pages of Nadia's story.

In writing One Thing Stolen, I grounded my hope in the work of (and email conversations with) Bruce Miller, MD, who directs the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and whose work on FTD "emphasizes both the behavioral and emotional deficits that characterize these patients, while simultaneously noting the visual creativity that can emerge in the setting of FTD."

But in my novel, Penn doctors are at work as well, and just days ago, on March 20, Penn Medicine researchers announced, and here I'm quoting from the press release, the discovery that " hypermethylation - the epigenetic ability to turn down or turn off a bad gene implicated in 10 to 30 percent of patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Frontotemporal Degeneration (FTD) - serves as a protective barrier inhibiting the development of these diseases. Their work, published this month in Neurology, may suggest a neuroprotective target for drug discovery efforts."

Later on in the release, this quote from Corey McMillan, PhD, research assistant professor of Neurology in the Frontotemporal Degeneration Center in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania:  "We believe that this work provides additional data supporting the notion that C9orf72 methylation is neuroprotective and therefore opens up the exciting possibility of a new avenue for precision medicine treatments and targets for drug development in neurodegenerative disease,” says McMillan.

So all of that is number 1. Hope, again.

For number 2, I encourage you to read this deeply moving essay by Daniel Zalewski in the March 30 issue of The New Yorker. Titled "Life Lines," it traces the journey of a former New Yorker illustrator whose brain, attacked by a virus, now lives in the ever-present now, most of her hippocampus destroyed. Researchers are studying her ability to learn and form memories within this new neuronal environment. There is hope there. There is also the prospect of new science.

Finally, for numbers 3 and 4, I encourage you to return to two blog entries posted earlier in this year. The first reports on Judith Scott, a woman born profoundly deaf and with Down syndrome, whose artistic capabilities were unleashed late in life—that brain wanting art again. The second reports on the lawyer Patrick Fagerberg, who was struck in the head at a music concert and diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. Here again the brain compensates and, in compensating, chooses art.

This—the compensating brain, the deep neuronal desire to make beauty out of chaos—is the theme of One Thing Stolen, a book that takes place both in Florence, Italy, and on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania (and features some Penn students as key characters.) Some of what I'll briefly touch on during our 7-Up tomorrow night.

Hope to see you there.

WRITING ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH

Junior Fellows Program

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

As this years recipient of the Kelly Writers House Junior Fellows Prize, Hannah White has undertaken a project to make the Writers House a space where we can talk about issues of mental health and illness from a writers perspective. In traditional "7-Up" style, seven different people (students, professors, community members) will each select and then write/speak about an important novel, short story, or poem dealing with issues of mental (in)stability. "Important" can mean anything here: personally important, culturally important, historically important, obscure but interesting, challenging to the traditional ideas of illness and wellness, etc. We hope that a wide range of perspectives and literary works will bring together seemingly disparate subsets of the wider community—and will also reveal plenty of interesting ideas about health, culture, relationships, and what is "normal."

• Ryan Cambe
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

• Beth Kephart
One Thing Stolen by Beth Kephart

• Devon O'Connor
"Round Here" by Counting Crows

• Nick Moncy
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

• Julie Mullany
"Barbie Doll" by Marge Piercy

• Emily Sheera Cutler
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

• Claudia Consolati
Melancholia, directed by Lars von Trier

• Lance Wahlert
Narratives of suicide

• Michelle Taransky
"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg

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Yesterday, on my way to teaching at Penn, I took a small detour to see a Paul Strand exhibit in the Fine Arts building. Then climbed the steps. Took out my phone. And snapped this shot through the window.

Damn, I thought. How lucky am I to be a spring semester adjunct here. This campus. This place. This Creative Writing arm of an English Department USA Today just ranked second in the nation.

Last year, Avery Rome and I joined forces and hosted Michael Sokolove (Drama High) as a special guest. Michael thrilled our students, taught us many things. This year, I'm enormously blessed to be hosting Daniel Menaker, who edited fiction for The New Yorker for 25 years and served as the Executive Editor in Chief of Random House, acquiring books by some of my favorite writers. In his various editorial capacities, Daniel has worked with Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, George Saunders, Charles McGrath, William Trevor, Norman Rush, Katha Pollitt, Colum McCann, Amy Bloom, Antonya Nelson, Salman Rushdie—and many others. He has also written a memoir I loved, My Mistake. I wrote about that here—a blog post that initiated an unexpected conversation.

Daniel will be at the Kelly Writers House on February 24, beginning at noon, when he and I will be talking about the vagaries of the publishing industry. The larger community is welcome. At 1:30, my class will join with Lorene Carey's class to talk in private about My Mistake.

After Daniel was in touch regarding my words about his book, Jeff Hobbs, the wholly compassionate and deep-seeing author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, got in touch about this blog post, in which I spoke of how I was incorporating his book into my teaching plan. Jeff, who lives in California, offered to come visit my class as part of a larger east coast tour. When the dates weren't quite working out as we had hoped, a Skype visit was planned instead.

And so my students will have the opportunity to meet two authors whose books and lives inspire. My students—who are teaching me words like "jawn" and authors like Maira Kalman, teaching me narrative photography and the nuance of talk, the pronunciation of complex cloud forms and the Black Scholes equation. We are learning memoir new, and we are learning it together, and I am beyond delighted that the neon lyric of our conversation will be further radicalized by Daniel and Jeff.

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Roxie was one of the very first kid lit people to welcome me to New York in 2012. I have visited her in her home and lovely studio here in New York City. Roxie is the author/illustrator of more than 35 … Continue reading →

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  Click on the image below to read Mallory Ortberg’s adroit piece.

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Among the various challenges we writers face is believing in the job we've given ourselves to do (for no one but us, let's be honest, requires us to take the storytelling burden/privilege on).

In her writing about Rachel Cusk in this week's The New Yorker (January 5, 2015), Elaine Blair explores Cusk's own growing uneasiness about the literary enterprise:

Since the early nineties, she has reliably published a novel or a memoir every few years. But in an interview with the Guardian last August, Cusk said that she had recently come to a dead end with the modes of storytelling that she had relied on in her earlier novels. She had trouble reading and writing, and found fiction "fake and embarrassing." The creation of plot and character, "making up John and Jane and having them do things together," had come to seem "utterly ridiculous."

Blair goes on to write of the novelists who today speak of "trying to expand the possibilities of the novel" by "incorporating the techniques of memoir and essay, of hewing closer to the author's subjective experience, of effacing the difference between fiction and their own personal nonfictions." Blair then asks: "Haven't novelists always put autobiographical material to use in novels? Haven't we been reading about a character called 'Philip Roth' for years?"

I am easily accused of personalizing my fiction—doesn't matter where (Berlin, Seville, Florence, Juarez, a mental institution, a cortijo) or when (1876, 1871, 1983) the story takes place. I've never known whether that makes my stories more or less ridiculous, never imagined myself trying (in that way) to expand the possibilities of the novel; these personalized fictions are just the only stories I've held within, or been capable of writing through.

But I wonder how it is for you. How much of you is inside your fiction. How you protect yourself from drawing the conclusion that the conjuring of story lines is finally ridiculous?

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In this week's New Yorker, in a piece called "The Word Shed," Colum McCann writes of his father, a features editor and author, typing away in a shed. McCann, at the time, was a kid. Wanted to play soccer. Didn't pay his father's two-fingered typing much mind.

Until a book his Dad wrote appeared, written for kids, called "Goals for Glory," the story of a boy without much money who dreamed of soccer triumphs.  McCann read the story by flashlight, he says. One year later, when the book was published, he took it to school, where his teacher read one chapter per week to McCann and his classmates.

I pick up McCann's telling of this perfect story here:

I will never forget Christopher Howlett, my red-headed desk mate, jumping around like a prayer in an air raid as Mr. Kells reached the final page. Georgie scored the winning goal. The classroom erupted. The kid from my father's shed—that tangle of hair that had somehow sprung up from behind a typewriter ribbon—was carried with us outside the school gates, down Mart Lane, through the swamp, and into the field at the back of Dunnes Stores, where, with a soggy leather ball at our feet, we all became Georgie, at least for a minute or two.

Two days ago, I wrote here of why I write, of how it calms me, of how it releases me, for a spell, from the world. I'd like to amend that post to say this as well:

I write for that one reader (there need be only one) who may "jump around like a prayer in an air raid" while reading toward or listening for the story's end.

Do we love Colum McCann? Oh, yes we do. Do we love his dad? That, too.

(Oh how I came to own three copies of Transatlantic, and other McCann love.)

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Today we look at the work of Peter de Sève, Cartoon Brew's Artist of the Day!

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I'm not sure how many books have been added to my library courtesy of the great critic James Wood—which is only to say that I read his essays, and I believe him. But this weekend, thanks to this Wood review in The New Yorker—this welcome defense of the odd in literature—I bought Samantha Harvey's Dear Thief.

And swooned.

Those wanting a plot summary will have to do (here) with this single sentence: A woman, middle-aged, is writing a letter to the friend that she loved and hated and loves still, and still hates.

What matters, mostly, is the way that letter is written, the compression and elegance of time that it portrays, the unreliability of testimony and the sick power of delusion (self delusion, the delusion of others), and the sentences, one after another, so brilliant.

The voice.

The anti-instructions on writing, like this:

I have wondered about this kind of thing for the last hour, sitting here turning the piece of Roman jet in my hand and trying distractedly to think of ways of describing it. This is what writing does to you, it seems, it turns objects that used to be just things in your life into things that must be described, and at the same time makes them feel increasingly indescribable.

The statements of paradoxical fact (perfectly bound up with the novel, perfectly true within our own lives):

I wonder if not being able to see ourselves is one of the great paradoxes of being alive—knowing oneself intimately and also not at all. You turn to look at your own profile in the mirror and it is gone. It means we can harbour all kinds of illusions about ourselves that others can see through as clear as day. What I mean is that if you had been able to see yourself objectively that afternoon you might have realised that the game was lost, but instead I think you fancied yourself in some little role in which you were the heroic returner, the one much waited for, the one who would be forgiven by some obscure law of justice that grants immunity to the tragic.

The articulation of life:

We encroach on one another, be it painfully or pleasurably, we encroach and run into each other, and this is what we know fondly or otherwise as life. It is not life to think that to love somebody is never to be where they are and never to intrude upon them.

Obviously I need to say no more.

Just buy it.

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It's been a week of long and important correspondence with friends. Among the topics: How do we manage lives built (in part) of original ideas? Stories that haven't been previously told. Characters that don't come pre-packaged. Books that don't fit the cross "this famous book" with "that famous book" and you have this new easily tagged and marketed and therefore soon to be famous book.

We talk, we ponder, we encourage. We look for signs.

I found one this morning, reading James Wood (oh, bless James Wood) in The New Yorker, discussing, in an essay titled "Fly Away," the work of Samantha Harvey.

I'd like to share the opening paragraph:

The odds are powerfully stacked against Samantha Harvey's third novel, "Dear Thief" (Atavist): sometimes you feel that the author has enjoyed building a trembling wall of them. Her novel takes the form of a long letter, written by a woman in middle age, to her childhood friend, and so most of the narration languishes in the corridor of the second-person singular. The friend (the "thief" of the book's title) disappeared a decade and a half ago, and so the narrator does much reminiscing, with the danger that the novel drifts fairly often into the pressureless zones of retrospect. And the narrator's lost friend was a "character," a large personality remembered, with loathing and love, for her enigmatic singularity: so, most perilously, Harvey's novel must work to convince us that this vague "you" of the narrator's letter deserves her extravagant reputation and the time spent recalling her. The book is sometimes precious or whimsical, and can be frustratingly diaphonous. It has nerves of silk; it could probably do with more robustness, and a bit of comedy.

So it is odd, Wood tells us. So it veers. So it isn't what we "expect." And yet, the rest of this fantastic essay is devoted to the beauty and success of this novel "with no interest in conformity."

To which I say, Yes. Through which I decide, I am buying Samantha Harvey.

Thank goodness for James Wood and The New Yorker (which also celebrates the poetry of Olena Kalytiak Davis is in this issue). Thank goodness for publishers who believe that there are readers out here who are willing to venture into non-conformist territory. Thank goodness for editors who say, It's worth the risk. You are.

And thank goodness for my friends who believe, with me, in the odd and the new.

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I'm absolutely certain that Olena Kalytiak Davis would not have loved the idea of me sometimes looking for the ephemera of her when I visited Alaska this past summer.

But I did. I searched. Couldn't help it.

I'd met her at Bread Loaf. She'd haunted us all. Reading in the moted light about a wedding dress. Sitting on a stoop in the early morning, the smoke of a cigarette swirling. The things people say and the things she said, and the delicate and fierce in her, and later, riding a train from DC with a fellow National Endowment for the Arts juror, the talk between him and me was almost all Olena. Where she was. What she was doing. How much better mystery is, than fame.

She lives in Alaska. She's a single mom and an attorney. She has a new book out, a third, "The Poem She Didn't Write and Other Poems." And also: Dan Chiasson just gave her two amazing pages in this week's issue of The New Yorker.

I gasped when I saw it. Hadn't find her in Alaska. Found her here, in the dark, after a many-hour work day, when I needed a little actual poetry.

From the last paragraph in this exquisite bit of appreciation, lessons on poetry, thoughts on Davis:

The medium of poetry isn't language, really; it's human loneliness, a loneliness that poets, having received it themselves from earlier poets, transfer to their readers. Like bees in a honeycomb, writers and readers experience isolation and solitude communally and collaboratively.... Writing a poem, you create that vivid otherness; reading one, you re-create it in your own person. These two lonely souls, writer and reader, are bound to one another. They can be miles or centuries apart, but in Davis's book the passage between them sees some heavy traffic.

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There's a very special young woman at Chronicle Books (I think I've mentioned this) named Taylor Norman. Has books—and kindness (and smarts)—in her blood. Is out there reading our manuscripts, tweeting our stories, talking about our books, talking us off cliffs if, indeed, we find ourselves standing on cliffs.

A few days ago, Taylor, who, read One Thing Stolen, my novel about Florence, Italy, art, obsession, and mental wellness, when it wasn't much of a book at all (oh, poor Tamra, and oh, poor Taylor), sent this link from The New Yorker. It tells the tale of an exquisite fiber artist, Judith Scott, whose work involved the making of secrets—embedding umbrellas and tree branches and other found objects within weaves and knots.

But that is not all of who Judith was. Judith was a twin sister, born with Down syndrome, whose profound deafness went undiagnosed while she lived out her years in an institution. Here is the story, in the words of New Yorker writer Andrea K. Scott:

Scott died in 2005, at the age of sixty-one, and didn’t start making art until her mid-forties. She was born with Down syndrome, went deaf as a child, and never learned how to speak. Languishing in an institution in her native Ohio for more than three decades with her deafness undiagnosed, Scott was considered so beyond help that she wasn’t allowed to use crayons. In 1986, her fraternal twin, Joyce, brought Scott to San Francisco and enrolled her in Creative Growth, a community art center for disabled adults. At first, Scott dabbled in drawings. A smattering are in the show, but they’re no match for the radical beauty that followed, when Scott took a textile workshop and had a breakthrough, loosely binding sticks into an uncanny totemic cluster. As her work gained complexity, the Bay Area began to take note; by 2001, Scott had been the subject of major shows in Switzerland, Japan, and New York.

So much about this story sears. And yes, Taylor, this reminds me, in so many ways, of Nadia Cara, my character, whose art is also a secret as well as a compulsion coming from a secret place.

Judith Scott's work is now on display at the Brooklyn Museum. I intend to see it.

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Although The Beat is a loyal New Yorker subscriber (it’s the only thing that holds our attention whilst on the elliptical) just beause you’re a subscriber does’t mean you get the Cartoons of the Year special edition. However if our email is to be believed, this issue includes several new pieces that may necessitate a trip to the newsstand.

Michael Maslin has an index of the cartoons reprinted within—among them Emily Flake, Shannon Wheeler and Liana Finck. HE also made a screenshot of the cover, so we can find it on the newsstand.

Shannon Wheeler has also drawn a 3-page comic strip about Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson (no relation) the “father of the comic book.” His granddaughter Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson (an occasional Beat contributor) sent out a teeny preview to whet our appetites.

Paul Karasik has also written a two page article dissecting a Charles Addams cartoon. He also sent along a preview!

This week’s regular issue has a cover by Richard McGuire referencing HERE, which comes out any day now. There’s the usual cover feature explaining it:

“As I walk around the city, I’m time-travelling, flashing forward, planning what it is I have to do,” Richard McGuire says about this week’s cover. “Then I have a sudden flashback to a remembered conversation, but I notice a plaque on a building commemorating a famous person who once lived there, and for a second I’m imagining them opening the door. This is the territory of my new book, ‘Here,’ playing with time in both a historic and personal way.”

 

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Yesterday, a day of challenges and breakthroughs, I read just two things, briefly. The first was the James Wood essay in the October 20 New Yorker, "No time for lies," about the Australian novelist, Elizabeth Harrower.

I feel the need to share the entire first paragraph. If you are skimming, please read, at least, the last line.

The Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower, who is eighty-six and lives in Sydney, has been decidedly opaque about why she withdrew her fifth novel, "In Certain Circles" (Text), some months prior to its publication, in 1971. Her mother, to whom she was very close, had died suddenly the year before. Harrower told Susan Wyndham, who interviewed her a few months ago in the Sydney Morning Herald, that she was absolutely "frozen" by the bereavement. She also claims to remember very little about her novel—"That sounds quite interesting, but I don't think I'll read it"�and adds that she has been "very good at closing doors and ending things.... What was going on in my head or my life at the time? Fortunately, whatever it was I've forgotten." Elsewhere, Harrower has cast doubt on the novel's quality: "It was well written because once you can write, you can write a good book. But there are a lot of dead novels out in the world that don't need to be written."

I don't know what these words do to you, but I am filled with melancholy as I read them. I am thinking about all the times we writers question our own work and purpose. How often we wonder if we are done in, or perhaps diluted. How greatly we fear this fate, of producing well-written dead novels. Bully for Elizabeth Harrower for being brave enough to name the fear. To care about the quality of the work she yields. To recognize that merely well written isn't good enough.

The second article I read yesterday was written by Alexandra Alter for The New York Times—an update on Anna Todd, the twenty-five-year-old erotica writer who "found inspiration in Harry Styles, the tousle-haired heartthrob from the British boy band One Direction." Todd shared her tale on Wattpad. Simon & Schuster has paid her a sweet six figures for the right to rebroadcast the Styles erotica under its Gallery imprint. The whole will be coming soon to a theater near you, thanks to Paramount Pictures.

Here is Todd, as reported by Alter, describing her process:

Then she found her calling — in the unlikely form of a baby-faced pop star. Ms. Todd started out as a reader on Wattpad in 2012, and quickly found herself spending several hours a day reading serialized fictional stories about One Direction. Last spring, she started writing her own story. “It took over my life,” she said.

With her husband’s support, Ms. Todd quit her job working at a makeup store counter to write full time. She updated “After” with a new chapter every day to meet readers’ demands and tapped out much of the book on her cellphone. She wrote for five hours a day and spent three hours trading messages with readers on Wattpad, Twitter and Instagram and drew on those comments to help her shape the story.

“The only way I know how to write is socially and getting immediate feedback on my phone,” she said.

One established, well-respected novelist pondering whether a book is alive enough, choosing to live quietly, without fanfare. A debut novelist tapping out a book on a phone based on a band, building a story according to Wattpad comments.

The bookends of my yesterday.

The ironies of publishing.

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You want to know what honesty is? It's the ability to stare straight into the heart of something and speak the truth. Not the comfortable distortions. Not the way you wish it were—it or you. Meghan Daum piercingly and hauntingly writes the truth in this new piece in The New Yorker.

From an essay in the September 29 edition, entitled "Difference Maker." Spare, searching, riveting, deep, this essay that took my breath away.

There was a grassy lawn where the dog rolled around scratching its back, and a big table on the deck where friends sat on weekends eating grilled salmon and drinking wine and complaining about things they knew were a privilege to complain about (the cost of real estate, the noise of leaf blowers, the overratedness of the work of more successful peers). And as I lay on that bed it occurred to me, terrifyingly, that all of it might not be enough. Maybe such pleasures, while pleasurable enough, were merely trimmings on a nonexistent tree. Maybe nothing—not a baby or the lack of a baby, not a beautiful house, not rewarding work—was ever going to make us anything other than the chronically dissatisfied, perpetually second-guessers we already were.

An interview with Meghan on The New Yorker blog is essential reading for anyone contemplating a memoir or memoiristic essay. Among other things, Meghan speaks of the difference between having material and having something to say.

Yes. And absolutely.

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The New Yorker (online) has a fascinating article titled, "The Bookstore Brain." It's by Sam Sacks who writes the Fiction Chronicle for the Wall Street Journal and is an editor at Open Letters Monthly. I came upon this article while doing research for another article on by-pass marketing for selling books and became engrossed. It's an inside look at book stores and how they determine which

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