Lucia Berlin

“What did people do before Prozac?” Lucia Berlin wrote in a letter to Lydia Davis. “Beat up horses I guess.” You can read a version of Davis’s foreword to Berlin’s stories on the New Yorker site (so do).

Better to read Moby-Dick on your phone than not to read it at all.

Jay Parini writes about Gore Vidal’s greatest feuds and the “effort, strenuous at times” to stay friends with him.

And poor David Foster Wallace has been dragged into an arcane argument about who counts as a bro in the literary world.

Still, Joan Didion has a related problem. At the Atlantic, Meghan Daum reads the new biography and considers Didion-ness: “Didion may be a white girl to whom generations of white girls have been disproportionately drawn, but she’s one we—and all kinds of readers—have desperately needed.”