Europa Editions has released an excerpt from the beginning of a new Elena Ferrante novel. The still-untitled book, which will be released in Italy in November, does not yet have a US release date and will be translated by Ann Goldstein.
Attica Locke talks to The Guardian about forgiveness, home, and her new book, Heaven, My Home. “I live in LA now, but Texas is my home in a way that will never be displaced in my heart and soul. It’s the lens through which I see the world,” she said. “I don’t mean its current state or politics. I mean I come from rural, agrarian people. There’s a fortitude I draw on when I struggle: a practicality of life that comes from my Texas upbringing, particularly my agrarian upbringing. Texas is very deeply my home.”
“Ohio is meant to stand for America as a whole. I wanted to show the way American women are cornered, ignored, and brutalized—by the media, politicians, and criminals,” Ducks, Newburyport author Lucy Ellman says of her work. “But I also wanted to fill my fictional landscape with Indian mounds, with which Ohio is plentifully supplied. America’s genocidal past, in the extermination of native people and the exploitation of slaves, has to be looked at if you want to see what this country is really made of.”
At Literary Hub, Nick Ripatrazone reflects on self-publishing and it’s not always the best idea. “All writers are vain. We believe our words matter,” he writes. “But a little ambition is best tempered by a little rejection, and perhaps more than a little editing.”
Malcolm Gladwell tells Entertainment Weekly that he doesn’t understand the criticism that his writing generalizes complicated topics. “I find a lot of these criticisms along those lines are incredibly vague. I’m slightly baffled by that,” he said. “I guess I need somebody to be very, very specific about, what is the thing that I have generalized and how, and then I can respond to it. But I don’t think I do it. Or if I do, it is a necessary simplification in the name of making something accessible to a broad audience. That’s what journalists do.”