1. Andrea Barrett has a story in the new issue of Tin House: "The Ether of Space". (Sarah Weinman also contributes an essay on domestic thrillers.)

2. The latest on Joan Didion's upcoming memoir about her daughter's death Blue Nights. (Via Maud Newton)

3. Maria Shriver interviews poet Mary Oliver in the new issue of Oprah. The magazine is quite impressive this month - I picked it up when I saw that it includes 36 pages on poetry; I can't imagine another lifestyle magazine doing something like this. (The whole interview is online.)

4. I've been deeply immersed in the world of Jack Kerouac for quite some time now. He's only a bit part of the next book (the western book) but once you start with him it's hard to walk away. Part of my fascination comes from knowing his background so well. He comes from my grandfather's generation, the same French Canadian stock and Lowell, MA is so similar to my family's hometown of Woonsocket, RI that they might as well be the same. Neither has changed much over the years either. Every time I go back to Woonsocket (most recently last fall), I am struck by how easily I can envision my childish father walking the couple of blocks home from Holy Family. All the descriptions of Kerouac, dressed in flannel shirts and work boots, echo the visions of my father and grandfather.

Honestly, for the longest time when I was young, I thought "blue collar" meant you wore shirts with blue collars which my father did every day. It wasn't what he did, it was who we were.

What the Mondor family did not do however was drink. Kerouac's alcoholism is so epic that it's hard to read anything about him without being gripped by it. And yet he could turn a phrase in the most beautiful way, especially when he wrote about seeing America from a writer's eye. Everything he wrote about writing is smart and insightful and resonates still. From his journals (1947-1954) this made me smile:

Nowadays if I kept a writing log, would say, "Tonight wrote equivalent of 3000-words on a 300-word page."

I am most intrigued though by how many people embrace the stories Kerouac wrote without taking into account what living those stories did to him. Neal Cassady was magic but it was a brutal magic that left Kerouac burned alive as did his endless drive to distance himself from Lowell while at the same time running back to it every time he had a chance.

And don't even get me started on Catholic guilt or his mother. (I wonder what would have happened if his father had not died?)

I keep thinking of all the young men who came in the door at the Company looking for that thing that would change their lives forever. Flying in Alaska was their big dream adventure and yet it couldn't save them. Nowadays boys just like them are applying for jobs as loggers or truckers or, God help them, fisherman, chasing the promises packaged and sold on the cable tv. And how many have copies of On the Road or Call of the Wild or Into the Wild shoved in their backpacks when they get up there?

How many have all three?

But still - can you stand the beauty of his words -

"the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."

And now Jack Kerouac, in only the best way, they think of you.

LINK: Denver honors Neal Cassady last month:

I think it's because they represent a uniquely American rite of passage," Dalton says. "It's about questioning authority, figuring out your spirituality and sexuality and place in the world.

"They broke free of social norms," she said. "The end result for many of them was rather tragic, but it's their searching that is what's so compelling."