Some recent reads worth sharing:
- More great books of the 21st century. As reported in last week’s Friday Five, The New York Times gave us its list of the 1oo best books of the 21st century. In response, the staff of Literary Hub shared their own list of 71 books the Times overlooked. Given that I’ve read only eight books on the Times‘ list and just one on LitHub’s, I’ve got a lot to add to my to-be-read list.
- Fabulous flash fiction to read — and study. I am a fan of Kathy Fish‘s writing and her perspective on the craft. So when she sends an email with the urgent headline “Four Flashes You Need to Read Right Now!” I take heed. In this post, she introduces readers to four incredible short-short stories and offers her thoughts on why they work. (Bonus: check out Kathy Fish’s latest story, an experimental work called “Cracks,” which was published recently in Matchbook.
- In praise of late bloomers. As someone who decided to switch from a good career and job in higher education to become a writer focused on fiction and creative nonfiction, I was happy to discover this article about how by Henry Oliver, author of the forthcoming book, Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. Vera Wang, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Grandma Moses, Samuel Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright — all of these successful people fit the late bloomer mold, Oliver says in his article, “How to be a late bloomer in 2024.”
- A few thoughts on Alice Munro. The topic on many writers’ minds these days is Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro. She she died earlier this year, many writers, journalists, and fans of her writing mourned her passing and wrote tributes to her influence and enduring legacy (here’s mine). But the recent essay by her daughter, Andrea Skinner, that detailed the sexual abuse she endured from her stepfather and the decision by her mother, who learned of the abuse years later, to stay with him, has many in the literary world trying to figure out what to do about Alice Munro. How do we reconcile the beloved author and her wide-ranging influence with these revelations? A recent NPR Books newsletter shares links to several stories. A couple of Substack essays on the topic I found worth reading are “Was Alice Munro and Art Monster?” by Meghan Daum , whose piece explores “the degree to which Skinner’s revelation unspools the feminist mythos surrounding Munro,” and “What I’m Doing About Alice Munro,” by Brandon Taylor, who writes about his own experience as a victim of child molestation. “Something happens to you when you experience something awful, the worst thing that can happen in fact, and no one around you does anything,” Taylor writes. “When the fact of the awful thing happening to you goes unrecorded and unremarked. It is a kind of death and a kind of dream.”
- “Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive …” These are just a few of the nuggets of wisdom for writers from film and media studies professor John Durham Peters in a 2015 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books about his book The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. I discovered these nuggets on a website called Submitted for Your Perusal, which I discovered via the June 21 edition of Austin Kleon‘s newsletter (which is well worth reading).
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Andy writes! 
This is a great Friday Five. Now I am completely distracted from my planned Friday Focus.
it’s probably too late now, but you could always wait until Saturday to fall down the Friday Five rabbit holes.