- Hitchens looks back at the Rushdie fatwa and its legacy of censorship.
- The Feltron 2008 Annual Report
- “The Governor and the Glove” – an encounter with Blagojovich
- Joseph O’Neill remembers Updike (via TEV)
- Ted Leo performs Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.”
- The Paleolithic era of online news.
- TNR reviews Outliers: “It is an axiom of Malcolm Gladwell’s method that a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule.“
Curiosities: The Governor and the Glove
Tuesday New Release Day: Bernhard, Martin, Dickens
Back in print is Thomas Bernhard’s memoir Gathering Evidence & My Prizes. Also new this week are a pair of spiffy box sets, George R.R. Martin’s Song Of Ice and Fire and the major works of Charles Dickens.
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Global Crises, International Art
Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich put together a reading list to help children understand the global refugee experience, and Kaveh Akbar compiled a list of poems from the seven countries — Iran, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria — impacted by President Donald Trump’s executive order. Meanwhile, Kieran Hebden (a.k.a. Four Tet) has been curating a Spotify playlist of music from those countries as well.
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Titling Publishers
How did Random House get its name? A joke. Book Riot gives the stories behind eleven publishers’ names. You could also read a piece on how writers title their novels.
New Murakami: The Strange Library
We recently published our review of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Now comes news that yet another Murkami book will be hitting shores before the year is out. The Strange Library, already available for pre-order, is 96 pages long, will ship in December, and will include “full-color art throughout in a lavish volume designed by Chip Kidd.”
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“Life is not personal.”
“This notion of investigation offers an alternative to confession. Its goal isn’t sympathy or forgiveness. Life is not personal. Life is evidence. It’s fodder for argument. To put the “I” to work this way invites a different intimacy—not voyeuristic communion but collaborative inquiry, author and reader facing the same questions from inside their inevitably messy lives.” Year in Reading alum Leslie Jamison writes for The Atlantic about alternatives to the confessional mode in literature.
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Just Listen
For this month’s fiction podcast at the New Yorker, Edwidge Danticat reads two Jamaica Kincaid stories, “Girl” and “Wingless,” following the publication of Kincaid’s recent See Now Then.
Writerly Obligations
Do writers owe their readers engagement on social media? “Our sole obligation to readers is to write the best books that we possibly can,” our own Emily St. John Mandel told The Guardian. Pair with our piece on the best of literary Twitter.
David Mamet Appliance Center
The “David Mamet Appliance Center” has some predictably abrasive customer service representatives. Here is Peter McCleery for McSweeney’s imagining a hilarious and existentially hopeless exchange between customer and technician. The Millions has even more to satisfy your fictitious-Mamet fix: an imagined symposium with Mamet, Francine Prose, and James Wood among others.
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