What Caught My Eye Online #15
A reader poll, author interviews, world lit, and more
Before we get to this week’s roundup, I thought I’d try out a poll for the first time. I’d love to hear your feedback about what content you most enjoy. I enjoy writing and coming up with content that fits each of the categories below, but I want to make sure I’m spending my time on what readers are excited about, too. Thanks for your help!
Here’s a great interview with Marilynne Robinson in which she discusses literature, writing, faith, and more. She has such a fascinating mind. This quote has stuck with me:
“People are much freer than they imagine.”
Adam Gopnik reflects on the COVID-19 pandemic for the New Yorker.
“What did it all mean? There are lots of takes on what happened, many of them plausible even as they contradict one another. A non-crazy case gets made that the period was just as epoch-changing as it seemed: a million people died of the plague in America; schoolkids were deprived of instruction and left behind in ways that may be impossible to remedy. The paranoia that was already rampant in the social-media age intensified, advancing the corrosion of institutional trust.”
Mateo Askaripour, author of Black Buck, shares on Goodreads a list of great sophomore novels from authors such as Celeste Ng, Yaa Gyasi, and Toni Morrison. I love this idea for a book list!
Author and publisher Safinah Danish Elahi recommends five Pakistani novels. I want to read more world literature, so I’m thankful for lists like these that make those titles accessible.
Speaking of world lit, here are 20 novels in translation releasing in 2024.
Over at Electric Literature, poet, professor, and YA author Amber McBride shares seven poetry collections about the complexities of Black womanhood.
Author Kelly Link shares 34 transformative prompts to unlock your writing.
Here’s a wild story from The Cut in which their financial columnist got scammed out of $50,000.
Leslie Jamison has a new book out this week, Splinters, which is great. Here she talks with The Millions.
I resonate with this article about enjoying the comfortable chairs in bookstores as a kid.
“More to the point, it’s impossible to turn the good feelings I got from those chairs into a quantifiable profit. My home life with three siblings and constantly irritated parents was chaotic, and I had no space to myself, mentally or physically. In the bookstore I could just read, the one thing a reader of books wants to do, and no one would bother me.”
What’s caught your eye this week? Thanks for reading!