A handyman at the H. C. Johnson Grocery Store in Robertstown, Georgia, reads a newspaper, July 1975. Photo: National Archives

• “There’s an endless appetite among film buffs for the contents of the cutting-room floor. We’re forever being offered outtakes and alternative endings and ‘director’s cuts’ of movies. But what do newspaper editors excise from raw copy destined for the printed page? What would a ‘writer’s cut’ look like?”
• Area Novelist Super Pissed He Keeps Getting Compared to Cormac McCarthy: “This is testament to the McCarthy hegemony, to how wholly he dominates an entire sector of American fiction, and to how he has usurped our understanding of a certain literary pedigree. Write a novel with a specific poetical register adequate to the task of addressing nature and redemption, one which includes the sanguinary madness of men, and McCarthy is the artist languidly at hand for every reader itching to make a connection.”
• “It was difficult sometimes to eat lunch with Robert because his makeup was so realistic. His brains were hanging out of his prosthetics.” An oral history of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
• Photographers have found themselves “in the age of citizen Instagrammers, in which phones carry an endless roll of virtual film, and there are so many photos that we think we’re entitled to have them for free.” What to do? Litigate!
• Our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, on the novels of the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine: “The heroes of his fiction are all misfits of one sort or another. They rebel against what they take to be the tyrannical conventions of Lebanese society—its patriarchy, its sexual norms, its sectarianism. In most of his novels this revolt takes the form of flight to America … In America, Alameddine’s characters discover that the pleasures of individualism often turn out to be empty, and their host country’s foreign policy, particularly its support for Israel, is a constant irritant. So their emigration is only ever partial; the old world haunts all their attempts at reinvention.”