Lolita, Hemingway, and our next reading line-up
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and monthly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.
The Warning Bell (Exclusive Excerpt)
by Alisson Wood
Once, at night, at the diner, he wrote about my age, how wrong it all was, that we shouldn’t be together—girls who are only eighteen are in Playboy and we are told to look and then you—. He didn’t finish the thought, even on a paper place mat. But he showed it to me. I understood at that moment in his classroom on my knees how Lolita worked her magic on Humbert. This must be what power feels like.
Feeling Bullish: On My Great-Uncle, Gay Matador and Friend of Hemingway
by Rebekah Frumkin
There were exasperated accounts of being forced to read The Old Man and the Sea or ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ in high school, of hating the terse, telegraphic style that has since become a parody of itself. I replied that I was reading Hemingway because I wanted to, and then added that my gay great-uncle had been his friend. ‘Your gay great-uncle?’ came the response. ‘Ernest Hemingway had a gay friend?’
Fate and Desire in Asian America
by Matthew Salesses
This idea of the self is much closer to the self you have known as a Korean American adoptee. You, like Jen, are attracted to the kind of novel that emphasizes your ability to decide your own life, but it doesn’t reflect your experience. You live in a context, not in a choice. What is free will, after all, to an adoptee?
Letter From Exile: Finding Home in a Pandemic
by Samiya Bashir
I was given two days—okay, less—to un-home myself. Borders were closing, they said, for our protection. Pack a life. Leave a life behind. Thrown away, one or two of us stayed despite it all. Ghosted the empty city streets in search of shelter. Home.
Writers’ Resources
Granta’s summer issue, is launching on Zoom this Thursday July 30! Register here and listen to readings from a selection of contributors, including Teju Cole, Leanne Shapton and Joe Dunthorne.
Register here for the next Memoir Monday reading—August 17, featuring Billy-Ray Belcourt, Rose Andersen, Damon Young, and Alisson Wood!
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