On But That’s Another Story, Will Schwalbe talks to Min Jin Lee about growing up in Queens, how George Eliot inspired her writing, and her new book, Free Food for Millionaires. “George Eliot’s attitude is, if you don’t know, you have to look it up,” she explained. “And I think in a way, her audacity and her brazenness has given me kind of a courage to use Korean words in my work, which I think are worth becoming loan words in English.”
Folio has collected a list of resources for freelance journalists, including organizations offering grants and lists of publications accepting pitches.
Kate Elizabeth Russell talks to the New York Times about hosting Instagram Live publicity events for her new novel My Dark Vanessa, which made the bestseller list despite being dropped from Oprah’s Book Club over controversial claims of plagiarism. “You see the people watching, and they leave comments in real time. You get the sense of something happening in the moment,” she said. “It feels comfortable to me, and I think a lot of other writers would probably say the same.”
Literary Hub’s Emily Temple examines what our quarantine reading choices say about us.
Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes author Maggie Hennefeld offers a playlist of comedies that find the humor in catastrophe, epidemics, and self-quarantine. “I hope it does not seem cavalier to thematize such raw, anxious, and gravely serious subjects—catastrophe, contagion, and quarantine—in the context of the present. Comedy has always been a vividly messy business,” she writes. “Laughter has always been a risk. Uproarious comedy gains utopian momentum from the grotesque shattering of all continuity with past traditions, which it stockpiles into a wasteland of yesterday’s exhausted decisions. Perverse as it may sound, laughter opens a gap toward something else.”