November 2011
14 posts
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“This is probably the sincerest, most biased account of ‘Best” your...”
– David Foster Wallace in his Introduction to the 2007 edition of The Best American Essays, for which he was Editor, or as he called it, “Decider.”
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Ayana Mathis: The Absence of Joy →
“I’m all for a good dose of literary misery, but I can’t help wonder if there aren’t additional meaningful, and dramatically potent, channels into the heart of the human experience…”
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Reasons not to self publish - The Millions →
My favorite point on this list is, “I GUESS I’M NOT A HATER.”
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Third Reich - Roberto Bolano
I’ve had the feeling I had when I started reading Third Reich a few times, brought on by the opening pages of The Lord of the Rings, my first Hemingway book, and Tulips by Sylvia Plath, for example. It was the feeling of reading something I knew I’d remember and love my whole life, the feeling of being excited to explore a writer new to me, the feeling of wanting to immediately...
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Future Book Alert!
Author of ROOM, in its 23rd consecutive week on the NYT bestseller list with more than a million copies sold, Emma Donoghue’s ASTRAY, a set of stories spanning centuries and continents, returning to her roots in historical fiction.
(From Publisher’s Marketplace, and I should really really read ROOM already.)
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The Top 25 - Kirkus Review's Best Fiction of 2011 →
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MRS NIXON - Ann Beattie
A book like this, the perfect marriage of fiction and meditation on fiction, comes along rarely, and I feel like I’ve only read one other, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Ann Beattie has created a tender, delicate, and at times judgmental portrait of both Pat Nixon and the pen-wielding goliaths other wise known as writers.
The subtitle, “A Novelist Imagines A...
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“They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each...”
– George Saunders, Tenth of December
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The Art of the Novel - Geoff Dyer →
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Richard Yates - Tao Lin
You know how people say you can’t understand a relationship you’re not a part of? I feel like RICHARD YATES by Tao Lin is all about that idea. It’s like Lin was like, well, here’s a relationship, here’s a fucked up relationship. And now he wants the readers to argue over who’s to blame for the callousness, the disfunction. The writing of RICHARD YATES seems...
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The lovely people at Farrar, Straus, & Giroux...
