Maggie Doherty reviews Mary V. Dearborn’s biography of Carson McCullers, author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, for the New Yorker: “A child in life, McCullers probed the emotional complexities of youth in her fiction. She is one of the great writers of American girlhood, someone who might be mentioned in the same breath as Louisa May Alcott and Judy Blume. But she was not a sentimentalist, or a young-adult author; rather, she used the techniques of literary modernism to depict the world as the child sees it, producing sophisticated works of fiction for a sophisticated crowd.”
Poet, essayist, translator, and publisher Lyn Hejinian has died. Hejinian was an influential figure in the Language poetry movement of the 1970s and was best known for her 1980 poetic biography My Life, which originally consisted of thirty-seven sections, each thirty-seven sentences long, written when the author was thirty-seven years old.
Vice Media is shutting down its flagship website and eliminating “several hundred” positions, “effectively shuttering its independent news operations,” the Washington Post reports.
Online at the Paris Review, novelist Nancy Lemann (Lives of the Saints, Sportsman’s Paradise) contributes a diary entry about visiting theme parks with her young daughters. Before making their way to Disney World, Lemann and her family take in the Holy Land Experience, which was built to replicate Jerusalem in the year 66 AD: “For some reason, children love theme parks no matter what they are about, even if what they are about is Babylonian tablets and outraged Spanish rabbis in the fifteenth century.”
Leslie Jamison is writing a new column, called “Viewfinder,” for Orion magazine. Each entry will be “inspired by the view from a different window.” In the first essay, Jamison looks out a window on the East River Ferry on her way home to Greenpoint.