Alan Heathcock was interviewed on an Idaho NPR radio show, “New Horizons in Education.” A good part of the interview is spent discussing “Peacekeeper”—which originally appeared in VQR and has since won the National Magazine Award for Fiction and been selected for Best American Mystery Stories.

Kevin Holtsberry, author of the Collected Miscellany blog, has a podcast interview with Brock Clarke, largely centered on Clarke’s essay “The Novel is Dead, Long Live the Novel,” from the Summer issue of VQR.

In anticipation of Brian De Palma’s film version of The Black Dahlia opening on September 15, we’re pleased to make available an essay by Ellroy originally published in our Summer issue (and now published as the afterword to the movie tie-in edition by Mysterious Press). Ellroy offers his thoughts on the movie and a coda to a subject that Ellroy admits obsessed him for most of his youth.

A personal story attends both novel and film. It inextricably links me to two women savaged eleven years apart. These women comprise the central myth of my life. I want to honor them both. I want this piece to redress imbalances in my previous writings about them. I want to close out their myth with an elegy. I want to grant them the peace of denied disclosure and never say another public word about them.

Some related links of interest:

• Mysterious Press offers an excerpt from the book.
• The L.A. Times published an essay by Ellroy on his move back to Los Angeles earlier this year.
• Rotten Tomotoes’ page on The Black Dahlia.
• The movie tie-in edition from Mysterious Press at Powells.com and Amazon.com.

(Our thanks to both Mr. Ellroy and his agent, Nat Sobel, for allowing us to publish the essay.)

At Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee offers praise for Divided Mind, a new collection of work by the essayist and critic George Scialabba:

[I]t is about time someone brought out a collection of Scialabba’s work. That it’s only happening now (15 years after the National Book Critics Circle gave him its first award for excellence in reviewing) is a sign that things are not quite right in the world of belles lettres. He writes in what William Hazlitt—the patron saint of generalist essayists—called the “the familiar style,” and he is sometimes disarmingly explicit about the difficulties, even the pain, he experiences in trying to resolve cultural contradictions. That is no way to create the aura of mystery and mastery so crucial for awesome intellectual authority. . . . Somewhere in my study is a hefty folder containing, if not George Scialabba’s complete oeuvre, then at least the bulk of it. After several years of reading and admiring his essays, I can testify that Divided Mind is a well-edited selection covering many of his abiding concerns. It ought to be interest to anyone interested in the “fourth genre,” as the essay is sometimes called.