Sam Anderson hates Thomas Pynchon.
Pynchon Angst
Two Gentlemen of Lebowski
Following in the footsteps of the recent Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, the Coen Brothers’ cult movie The Big Lebowski has received the Shakespeare treatment.
Show Me (Don’t Tell Me) State
Tired of the writerly hustle and bustle of New York City? Give Kansas City a try: “People stay here, or move here, because they have the cultural and financial freedom to try shit; if it doesn’t work, they try again.”
Shadowplay
Did his Nobel Prize win a couple years ago pique your interest in Patrick Modiano? Here’s another essay to sate it. In The Paris Review, Alice Kaplan examines his literary project.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Murakami, Jobs, Nadas, Millet, Kahneman
It’s another huge week for new releases. Happy Murakami day! Haruki Murakami’s long-awaited 1Q84 is finally here – look for our review tomorrow, as is Walter Isaacson’s headline-making biography of Steve Jobs. Also out is another massive and hotly anticipated work in translation (1152 pages!), Hungarian Peter Nadas’s Parallel Stories. Lydia Millet has a new novel out, Ghost Lights, and Thinking, Fast and Slow is set to arrive from Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
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Hateship, Movieship
The trailer is out for the film adaptation of Nobel laureate Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. The film will star Kristen Wiig, Guy Pearce, Hailee Steinfeld and Nick Nolte among others.
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Sehgal and Adichie in Conversation
In the introduction to her interview with the author, the inimitable Parul Sehgal described Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel, Americanah, as “a thrilling and risky piece of writing that takes on taboos, shatters pieties, and combines forthright prose, subversive humor, and a ripping good story.” If that doesn’t sell you, I don’t know what will.
Recommended Writers: Caribbean Edition
Ebony has a brief list of “Six Caribbean Writers to Discover This Summer,” and it’s a nice complement to Fortnightly Review’s recent double-feature on Dominican poets Homero Pumarol and Frank Báez. I also recommend checking out Generación Año Cero, an online collection of sixteen short stories from a “movement of [Cuban] writers who began publishing in 2000.”
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