Dan Brown gets D.C. wrong, says Slate. (But isn’t this just another way of saying that it belongs with almost every other narrative, literary or televisual, ever concocted about the Diamond District?)
It’s Not the Spectacles and Pageantry…
Hilary Mantel’s Torment and Joy
In her Shelf Awareness interview, Hilary Mantel admits that Wolf Hall, her recently released Bring Up the Bodies, and the trilogy’s forthcoming conclusion were originally conceived to be one book. That they kept expanding, she says, is “the torment and joy of writing fiction.” Meanwhile, over at The Daily Beast, the English author rounds up her five favorite historical fictions.
Tuesday New Release Day: Saunders; Erickson; Umansky; Lowe; Rohan; Drabble; Richler
New this week: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders; Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson; The Fortunate Ones by Ellen Umansky; All That’s Left to Tell by Daniel Lowe; The Weight of Him by Ethel Rohan; The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble; and Be My Wolff by Emma Richler. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Pulitzer Playlist
Soundtracks make for excellent background music when writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Junot Díaz wrote his first book with the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack on loop, he said during an interview with The Daily Beast.
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Kirkus Prize Finalists Announced
Starting this year, Kirkus Reviews will award the impressive sum of $50,000 each to three winners of their new Kirkus Prize, which recognizes works of fiction, nonfiction and children’s literature. This morning, they announced their first-ever batch of finalists, a long list including a few names who should be familiar to Millions readers: Elizabeth Kolbert (for The Sixth Extinction, which we published an essay about); Year in Reading alum Sarah Waters (for The Paying Guests); Thomas Piketty (for Capital in the 21st Century); New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast (for her memoir); and Siri Hustvedt (for The Blazing World, which we reviewed). Their judges will announce the winners on October 23rd.
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The Sartorialist
Scott Schuman, also known as The Sartorialist, has published a book of his on-the-street fashion photographs. For a taste of what’s in the book, take a look at his blog, The Sartorialist.
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The State of Reading (in the Bath?)
Hannah Withers and Lauren Ross have written about today’s state of publishing for McSweeney’s. Their conclusion? Young people read more than you. According to Laura Goode, though, moms are reading more YA novels than their kids. Either way, everyone can start reading in the bathtub thanks to waterproof paperbacks.
No Fake Readers
“An appreciation of readers as diverse individuals with different tastes should be a basic tenet of criticism. Instead, it’s common for critics to imagine that their aesthetic preferences are the reflections of “readers” or a special class of readers—“serious readers,” “imaginative readers,” “brave readers,” or some other ill-defined category—whose views truly matter.” Lincoln Michel explains why “there’s no such thing as a fake reader” in an essay for Electric Literature.
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