Writer, copyeditor, reviewer, and web content developer. Available for freelance and contract work. shannon.turlington@gmail.com
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And I can’t leave this link roundup without a little humor. By the way, if you haven’t seen Wonder Woman yet, it is great. Watch out, Travis.
DISCLAIMER: This is satire. This is fiction. This is not actually the Alamo Drafthouse writing this. C’mon.
Source: Alamo Drafthouse Apologizes for Starting Manpocalypse With Women-Only Screening
This is another fabulous essay by Rebecca Solnit: The Loneliness of Donald Trump | Literary Hub. That last line is devastating.
“Unfocus” enhances resilience, creativity, and decision making.
Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. …
Note: This is not my book club.
I recently posted about the Summer Reading Challenge, a mini Tournament of Books. I discovered two great new reads via this challenge.
Marlena by Julie Buntin is a coming-of-age story with such a genuine narrative voice and such well-delineated characters that it takes on all the appearance of truth. After her parents’ divorce, Cat moves with her brother and mother to a small town in northern Michigan, where she immediately connects with her neighbor, Marlena. Marlena has problems: a dad who cooks meth, a younger neglected brother, an addiction to Oxy. And in less than a year, she’ll be dead, under suspicious circumstances. Cat will spend years trying to deal with the fact of her death.
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge really hit all of my buttons. It’s about writers and writing and books, and so many American genre writers of the early twentieth century and their associates turn up as characters that it’s like being at the most fascinating cocktail party. (William S. Burroughs was my favorite of them.) When Marina’s husband Charles checks out of the mental hospital after having a breakdown and disappears with only his clothes left behind at the shore of a lake, she retraces his footsteps in the hopes he might still be alive. Charles had recently published a successful book about H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow. There are stories nested within stories within stories, and no narrator can be trusted. In the end, fact and fiction become inextricably blurred, but this is largely the point.
Two great summer reads to enjoy!
Lately, I’ve very much been appreciating the short book. In fact, I have tentatively come to the conclusion that a novel’s perfect length is between 250 and 350 pages.
It’s not that I don’t love big, fat, epic novels. In fact, I count several of them among my favorite reads: Lonesome Dove; The Passage trilogy; Anathem; The Stand and It. Perhaps it’s a side effect of growing older; as my time here gets shorter, my patience for long books wears thin. Or perhaps it’s because I’ve noticed that long books seem to be what’s expected these days, and I always appreciate those who buck the trend.
I’m a believer in the idea that boundaries can help foster creativity. The short form of the novel challenges the writer to be succinct and on point, to be deliberate about every choice, to tell the story in the most direct and pared-down manner possible. And as a reader, it feels very satisfying to complete a story in just a few sittings.
When you read shorter books, then you can read more books–another bonus! Here are a variety of short novels I’ve read over the last few months that I would recommend:
