- 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
“One story shook the Soviet Union.”
Writing for the BBC, Steve Rosenberg looks at the lasting impact and significance of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was published fifty years ago this month.
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Tell Shorter Stories
“The real world is massive and chaotic beyond the scope of any story, but the novel has always been the storytelling medium that could come closest to capturing it. And the novels that dared to really try – from Hugo to Tolstoy – are often the ones that have endured.” That’s not to say, of course, that bigger is always better, and in an article for The Guardian Damien Walter argues against the current glut of epic, serialized fantasy novels taking their cues from George R.R. Martin‘s A Song of Ice and Fire. As Walter puts it, “There are great fantasy short stories, novellas and single novels that deserve much wider audiences, but are sidelined by the industry’s unhealthy fixation with the serial format. It’s time for the fantasy genre to tell some new – shorter – stories.”
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Tuesday New Release Day
New this week stateside is buzzed-about Booker shortlister Room by Emma Donoghue. Also out: Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, a new collection by “20 Under 40” lister Yiyun Li; Sigrid Nunez’s post-apocalyptic Salvation City; and a McSweeney’s-published memoir Half a Life by Chang and Eng author Darin Strauss.
Jenny Offill and Jia Tolentino on Being Doomers at the Dinner Party
In this event recording, the writers discuss research rabbit holes and learn the presidential election results in real time.
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The Orange Eats Creeps Mixtape
Christopher Higgs was teaching Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps, and one of his students was inspired to make a mixtape featuring “the twisted, crusty, and often sublime characters found within the novel.” (The book, by the way, was one of my selections for Year in Reading last year.)
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Antiquarian Book Fair
This weekend is the last chance to visit the International Antiquarian Book Fair in Boston. Included are a collection of Bonnie and Clyde photos and an illustrated letter from Alexander Graham Bell to his parents describing problems with his phone invention.
Tuesday New Release Day: Perotta, Johnson, Pelecanos, Torres, Fonts, Murray
New this week: The Leftovers by Tom Perotta, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, The Cut by George Pelecanos, Justin Torres’s debut We the Animals, and Just My Type: A Book About Fonts. And new in paperback is Millions Hall of Famer Skippy Dies by Paul Murray.