The BBC’s Fergal Keane: ‘The breakdowns get harder to recover from each time’

The former BBC war reporter, now special correspondent, on the terror of PTSD, his tips for living with it day to day, and the people and poets he admiresDuring a career spanning more than 30 years, BBC special correspondent Fergal Keane has covered brutal conflicts in South Africa, Rwanda and Bosnia. It’s taken a lasting toll on his mental health, and in 2020 he stepped back from frontline reporting, revealing that he’s suffering from acute PTSD. In his memoir The Madness, newly published in paperback, he goes into greater detail, powerfully describing multiple breakdowns, alcoholism, and the inherited trauma that shaped his Irish childhood, as well as the resilience he’s found in himself. He will be talking at the Edinburgh International book festival on 17 August.What part of The Madness was hardest to write?Most difficult was what it was like to be in a psychiatric hospital. People talk about going mad and it conjures up all kinds of stereotypical images, but it’s terrifying, it’s this implosion. I’ve never been so afraid in my life. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2023-08-06 08:30:06 UTC ]

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US Copyright Office opens public comments on AI and content ownership

The US Copyright Office (USCO) wants your thoughts on generative AI and who can theoretically be declared to own its outputs. The technology has increasingly commanded the legal system’s attention, and as such office began seeking public comments on Wednesday about some of AI’s thorniest issues... Continue reading at Engadget

[ Engadget | 2023-08-31 17:02:25 UTC ]
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Growing Up in a Chinese Restaurant in Atlantic City

Jane Wong’s memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City is a feast of a book. It’s about hunger—the hungers of the body, of addiction, of history. Brilliant, gutting, and funny, she writes with such range about growing up in her family’s Chinese restaurant in Atlantic City as their reach for the... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2023-08-31 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Interview: Melissa Etheridge

“I have music and rhythm to help me get my point across,” says the singer and songwriter, whose new memoir is “Talking to My Angels.” “But real poets do it all just with the language and the lines. That’s a gift.” Continue reading at The New York Times

[ The New York Times | 2023-08-31 09:02:59 UTC ]
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Cover Reveal: See the cover for Greg Wrenn’s memoir Mothership.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, Greg Wrenn’s memoir, Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis forthcoming from Regalo Press. Here’s a bit about the book from the publisher: Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2023-08-30 14:30:33 UTC ]
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Clara Luper’s Diamonds and Acts of Radical Love: A Conversation with Cornel West, by Karlos K. Hill

Clara Luper’s Diamonds and Acts of Radical Love: A Conversation with Cornel West, by Karlos K. Hill Interviews [email protected] Wed, 08/30/2023 - 08:14 Dr. Cornel West / Courtesy of AAE SpeakersCornel West, who recently retired from Princeton... Continue reading at World Literature Today

[ World Literature Today | 2023-08-30 13:14:20 UTC ]
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Transition and renewal: The 10 best books of August

Our book picks this month touch on themes of change and renewal. They include a memoir about embracing a truer identity, a report on one Ohio town’s struggle toward racial equity, and a novel about pursuing the American dream. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor

[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2023-08-28 15:22:29 UTC ]
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Why Safiya Sinclair cut her dreadlocks and wrote a memoir of pain and poetry

Safiya Sinclair was raised to be Rastafari; instead, she became a poet. Why it took her more than a decade to write the lyrical memoir 'How to Say Babylon' Continue reading at Los Angeles Times

[ Los Angeles Times | 2023-08-28 15:00:14 UTC ]
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Former 'Friends' writer says the stars were unhappy and purposely tanked jokes they didn't like

A former "Friends" writer's new memoir details her experience on the show at a time when the stars seemed unhappy, and the writers room wasn't so friendly. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times

[ Los Angeles Times | 2023-08-25 01:20:03 UTC ]
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‘A tired old show’: Friends writer claims cast deliberately ruined jokes

Patty Lin says that Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry and co forced rewrites of gags they didn’t like by performing them badlyFriends may have been a worldwide smash hit that made megastars of its cast, but – according to one of its writers – the actors weren’t always trying their... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2023-08-24 10:34:01 UTC ]
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Making ‘Necessary Trouble’: A historian rises above her roots

Drew Gilpin Faust, former Harvard University president, discusses her memoir “Necessary Trouble,” about her rebellion against sexist and racist strictures of 1950s Virginia. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor

[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2023-08-22 16:11:00 UTC ]
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Amor Towles Sees Dead People

The novelist discusses his career and his recent essay about cadavers in crime fiction, and the actor Richard E. Grant talks about his memoir and his love of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Continue reading at The New York Times

[ The New York Times | 2023-08-18 17:55:09 UTC ]
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Lessons and Carols for Recovery and Redemption

John West’s Lessons and Carols is a lyric memoir of recovery, parenting, loss, and hope, which is also periodically quite funny (ex. the first line of the first Lesson, “Caring for this baby has taught me new ways to resent.”) Hopscotching through time, the memoir shows us West’s first, early... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2023-08-18 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Crafting Madness: Stephanie Heit on Joining a Lineage of Authors with Mental Health Difference

Stephanie Heit’s new book, Psych Murders, is a hybrid memoir poem that documents her experience of shock treatment. She traces her queer mad bodymind through breathlessness, damage, refusal, and memory loss as it shifts in and out of locked psychiatric wards and extreme bipolar states. Stephanie... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2023-08-18 09:25:04 UTC ]
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Pidgeon Pagonis on the Urgency of Writing a Memoir as an Intersex Writer

Pidgeon and I met in the summer of 2020, the summer of sickness, and violent change. We spoke over Zoom, nearly 800 miles apart—I had been hired as a developmental editor for an intersex activist named Pidgeon Pagonis. A developmental editor is a bit of a catch-all title: we do a bit of... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2023-08-17 09:20:26 UTC ]
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How to watch Christian Cooper discuss 'Better Living Through Birding' at L.A. Times Book Club

'Extraordinary Birder' host Christian Cooper brings his memoir 'Better Living Through Birding: Notes From a Black Man in the Natural World' to the L.A. Times Book Club. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times

[ Los Angeles Times | 2023-08-16 20:59:16 UTC ]
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The Memoir That Found Me: Michaele Weissman on Food, Marriage, and Identity

My husband, a professor of electrical engineering by trade, is the kind of obsessive for which I have an affinity in my writing life. A refugee born in Latvia, John loves Latvian rye bread fervently. He eats Latvian rye several times a day and is unable to leave home without a five-pound loaf... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2023-08-16 09:50:36 UTC ]
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Exclusive: See the cover for Wei Tchou’s experimental memoir Little Seed.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Wei Tchou’s Little Seed, “an experimental memoir that braids together the narrative of the author’s relationship with her brother and family with a deeply personal field guide to ferns,” which will be published by Deep Vellum/A Strange Object in... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2023-08-15 14:00:01 UTC ]
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Nicola Sturgeon’s ‘deeply personal and revealing’ autobiography to be published in 2025

Pan Macmillan will publish the former first minister’s as-yet-untitled memoirNicola Sturgeon’s “deeply personal and revealing” memoir will be published in 2025 by Pan Macmillan, after nine publishers bid for it at auction.After her resignation as Scotland’s first minister in February, Sturgeon... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2023-08-09 10:49:24 UTC ]
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Catherine Taylor Reads From The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time

Damian Barr’s Literary Salon tempts the world’s best writers to read exclusively from their latest greatest works and share their own personal stories. Star guests include Jojo Moyes, John Waters, Yaa Gyasi, Mary Beard, Diana Athill and Louis de Bernières—all in front of a live audience at... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2023-08-09 08:58:06 UTC ]
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