Jeffrey Goldberg interviews Quentin Tarantino in The Atlantic and writes about why Inglorious Basterds is a very un-Jewish treatment of rage toward Nazis.
Only a Gentile
Twists and Turns
Still haven’t read our own Edan Lepucki’s Colbert-endorsed novel California? Here’s another review to whet your appetite. In the latest Kenyon Review, John Domini writes that “Lepucki, however, not only upends expectation, but also parses out a few good surprises.”
●
●
“The grand and minute violence of everyday life”
Recommended Reading: Seth Cosimini on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.
●
●
“A different order of debut”
Hats off to our own Edan Lepucki for being named a Face to Watch by the LA Times! In an article, David L. Ulin says Edan’s upcoming novel is “steeped in southern California narrative tradition” and describes how a drive along Sunset Boulevard inspired the setting of the book. (You can catch up on Edan’s work by looking through her archive.)
●
●
Hidebound
A couple months ago, I linked to a new Granta series in which authors select one of their own first sentences and recall how they came to it. This week, Patrick French explains the first sentence of a nonfiction piece titled “After the War” (available in Granta 125) by digging up an old photograph that shows how the Edwardian English were “stitched and machined into a grid of expectations.”
#LastTweet
The Times collects the final tweets of a number of celebrities who died this year. They are generally banal but the context turns them poignant.
●
●
Fact or Fiction?
Recommended Reading: A fascinating interview from The Rumpus with Susan Shapiro. Shapiro’s newest novel, What’s Never Said, is out now from Heliotrope Books. You may also be interested in Beth Kephart‘s essay for The Millions about the utility of the outward-looking memoir and its crossover with other genres.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Koch; Shin; Henríquez, Foulds, Walsh, O’Neill; Dybek
New this week: Summer House With Swimming Pool by Hermann Koch; I’ll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin; The Book of Unknown Americans by Year in Reading alum Cristina Henríquez; In the Wolf’s Mouth by Adam Foulds; The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh; The Girl Who was Saturday Night by Helen O’Neill; and two new books, Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots, by Stuart Dybek.
Celtic Tiger’s Collapse
Gabriel O’Malley‘s “Letter From Dublin” for n+1 is an interesting primer on the current state of Ireland following the collapse of the Celtic Tiger.