“We’re also getting over the widespread sense that feminism was this historical phenomenon in the ‘70s and ‘80s and we won and everything’s beautiful and we can all shut the fuck up. Or it lost and we should all still shut the fuck up. There are so many theories about it that involve us all shutting up.”
— Interviewed Rebecca Solnit about feminism and mansplaining and power.

“What’s going on in these sentences is the fundamental business of nonfiction: the translation, at once exact and surprising, of world to word. Writers weight that ratio of exactitude and surprise differently; you can stay close or reach further, out toward the risky and weird. Dyer reaches. You can see it in those precise but strange sidecars, in that startling grammar of ruin, and finally in the sax solo, where, like Coltrane, he pushes so hard on his medium that it threatens to break. Note the word blues, pulling three times its weight—noun, adjective, verb, so much pivoting around it that all the referents go briefly haywire and it seems like the solo is still rising and what’s falling is the sky. And note, too, how the sentence itself is pretty and then dangerous: dangerous because it starts out too pretty (“pretty” is a pretty word; “so high the sky” is Hallmark stuff); beautiful because it ends in so much danger.”
— Important words: Katherine Schulz on Geoff Dyer.

“Agee, with his cold blue eyes, his thick dark hair and his handsome hillbilly Huguenot hatchet face, belonged on this wall of tragic-hero masks, at least till he inflated like a frog, from drinking alone in a Hollywood bungalow, and got kicked out of the 20th Century Fox studio commissary because he smelled so bad from never taking a bath.”
— To the late John Leonard, I would like to read more of your writing.

“… the way what can be measured always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed and efficiency over enjoyment and quality; the utilitarian over the mysteries and meanings that are of greater use to our survival and to more than our survival, to lives that have some purpose and value that survive beyond us to make a civilization worth having.”
— An argument against data journalism, or “the tyranny of the quantifiable” from Rebecca Solnit’s new book Men Explain Things to Me.

“David Lynch, the greatest and most influential film director of the past 30 years, is an elegant man in a three-piece suit with a plume of white hair reaching towards the sky; he is like a Sunday funnies newspaper cartoon of a Midwesterner, with a squeaky voice, impeccable manners, and a genial folksiness that would make the average grasping politician jealous. When Lynch says “guys,” “girls,” and “folks,” he means it, and doesn’t sound coached to death (unlike any Obama speech). Things are “magical,” “beautiful,” “amazing,” and are about “dreams,” in his world, in perfect sincerity.”
— Still amazed from the David Lynch talk at BAM last night.

Meet Alex Flynn, the Newest YA Novelist to Celebrate Female Underdogs →

How did you get in the head of 15-year-old Sarah? Did you draw from experience, observe other teenagers, etc.?

A little of both. One of us was once a teenage girl, so that helped. It’s also really fun to write while listening to Taylor Swift, she’s great at writing with that specific teenage intensity where everything is so important. Red is such a great album and we can’t wait for her next one. She’s definitely Sarah’s favorite musician.

Talking to Hello Giggles was so fun!

“Libraries exist and they’re open. Libraries exist with all these values we invoke in the digital sphere, but there are very few people thinking about how we might build upon them.”
— From an interview with the brilliant Astra Taylor, whose new book The People’s Platform is a must-read, provocative and questioning work about what we’re getting out of internet culture these days.

The Misshapes: Coming for Your Ereader

Hi Tumblr,

I cowrote an awesome book with Stu Sherman under a pseudonym, “Alex Flynn,” called The Misshapes for Polis Books which is available for your ereader of choice on Tuesday April 29th. It is the first in a trilogy!

It is a book about teenage superheroes with powers that suck. Our hero, Sarah, is trying to get into the Hero Academy of her dreams … but is she good enough? I feel like it’s a mix of Rushmore, Gilmore Girls, and The Tick. It’s funny and it’s a YA book and it’s the first in a trilogy. I love Sarah and all the Misshapes and I can promise that you’ll fall in love with Sarah’s crush Freedom Boy (the greatest Hero of all, who takes her on a flying date) and Sarah’s badass brother Johnny, who can turn water into alcohol (which is kind of a chronic illness if you think about it too hard) and makes handmade red t-shirts that say “this is not a red shirt.” The results should be weird and funny, I think.

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We have an official, single-serving website over here at The Misshapes where you can check out the first couple of chapters and order it in a variety of places.

Say hi on Goodreads.

Follow us on Facebook and you can win a t-shirt for being casually brilliant, which you are!

If you’re in New York, you can come to our book release party on Wednesday, April 30th at Housing Works with so many killer readers and you can also win a t-shirt.

Here are links to its Amazon page, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo!

Feel free to share, read, and let the world know! Any bit helps and its super appreciated. And if you don’t have an ereader, don’t worry…

You are the best,

Elisabeth (ie, one half of ALEX FLYNN)

“Like your character Daniel Quinn, you’ve met Castro. What’s it like, talking with Fidel?

Well, it’s absolutely like nothing else. He showed up the first day I was in Cuba, in 1987. I was in the house of [Gabriel] García Márquez. It was after lunch, I was sitting in the rocking chair, and Gabriel—Gabo—said to me, “Would you mind moving to another chair? The Comandante is coming and he likes the rocker.” Fidel came in, in his field jacket and his cap. He was very bulky in the chest and was probably wearing a bulletproof vest.

He stuck around for about three and a half hours. We talked about literature, movies. I was about to go into production for Ironweed. He was very genial and he arranged all of my itinerary. He arranged for me to go to Santiago and then up to Holguin, to fly over to the Isle of Pines, where he had been in prison.

We also talked about making Scotch, because he had some Czechoslovakian hops and he had sent some people to Scotland to find out how to make Scotch. He made some and I promptly got a bottle and drank some.

Was it any good?

It was a very nice beverage, but it wasn’t Scotch.”

From my interview with William Kennedy for The Paris Review. I hope he’s ok, he was great buddies with Gabo.

Last night I saw Katherine Boo and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc in conversation at the New York Public Library, and it was a great event. They’re both brilliant women who’ve worked on towering pieces of nonfiction, the sort that you’d recommend to aliens who wanted to know about the results of globalization in India and poverty in America and the Bronx. You must read Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Random Family.

But one thing that was interesting, throughout the event, was that LeBlanc, who I remember as a byline in Seventeen when I was reading it as a kid, which probably puts her in her early forties, is my guess, age-wise, had this ambivalence about, well, the bullshit of writing, and the way that the success of her book could have made her a TED talking head and go-to authority on poverty in America for years, talking and talking about it like it was sports but not actually doing anything concrete. Boo, on the other hand, seemed more at peace with her work and its legacy.

So let’s work this out: LeBlanc was probably in her thirties when Random Family hit in 2003. She was young. It took 11 years, and the book really made her a journalist to watch. Success can be difficult, particularly when it’s separate from the urgency of the work that you’re doing, and the message that you’re trying to spread: i.e., that poverty is a trap that is hard to get out of and America is doing a terrible job treating people with respect. The past ten years have had Bush, and wars, and America becoming even more economically stratified. We haven’t listened to the book, and the New York Times’ Invisible Child piece on Dasani reminded me, mostly, of Random Family. The past is repeating itself, and for that to happen for ten years has to be difficult. Whereas Boo worked on her book in her forties, and it came out in 2012, and she was already an enviably successful, MacArthur Grant winning genius before it even happened.

It was interesting to see the difference between the two, and some of LeBlanc’s anxiety explained, a bit, why she writes slowly. I’m very interested in her next book, which is about stand-up comedy. I presume it will be called The Comedians, and I bet the theme will be about how to speak truth to power and to get people to listen to you. Humor helps, sometimes.

“But I just feel like it’s dishonest to ignore the many structural things that are in the way of the thing I do being something people want to do as a career, depending on their circumstances. I hate when young people are found wanting for not making headway in careers where a lot of doors have been blocked. That’s my basic feeling.”
— Emily Nussbaum talking about her job in Rookie. It’d be nice if she could come to family events and tell my relatives these facts regarding journalism, too!