I had no idea Kanye read The Millions. Apparently, he’s not that impressed by our recent comments about him.
“This Website is Pretty Good…”
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Lacework
“The plot, obviously, is kind of difficult to explain, like an earnest, pared-down, hipster Foucault’s Pendulum. Not only are all of the plot turns above laid out through a multiframed narrative, replete with several people’s footnotes, but the events are interwoven with disquisitions on the history of map-making, Situationist philosophy, urban planning, and pop music.” At Slate, our own Lydia Kiesling reads Catie Disabato’s The Ghost Network. (ICYMI, Dan Lopez reviewed the book for The Millions.)
Measuring Detail Density
“Every story that works gets the level of description that it needs. Which isn’t to say that the level of description needed for every successful story is the same.” Tobias Carroll surveys the wide variety of detail density in fiction for Electric Literature.
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Haruki Murakami: Master of Blandness
Over at Threepenny Review, Jess Row expounds on “blandness” in the work of Haruki Murakami, and particularly in his 2.8 lb. tome 1Q84—a book tabbed by Charles Baxter in last year’s Year in Reading as the best he’d read all year. Row contemplates the way Murakami’s characters and sentences “almost never lose this placid, observant neutrality,” or “continuous monotone.”
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The HemingWAY
James Salter reviews Paul Hendrickson‘s Hemingway’s Boat for The New York Review of Books. Relatedly, Helena Price has been using 1000memories to compile “memory pages” to “explore the life of Ernest Hemingway as well as his friends and family.” Of particular note is this poster imploring us to “Live the HemingWAY.” Also related, The Paris Review shares a letter from Papa to his sister Ursala Hemingway.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sekaran; Lopate; Coover; Schweblin; Peelle; D’Agostino; Zhang; Doctorow
Out this week: Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran; A Mother’s Tale by Phillip Lopate; Huck Out West by Robert Coover; Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin; The Midnight Cool by Lydia Peelle; The Antiques by Kris D’Agostino; Lotus by Lijia Zhang; and Collected Stories by E.L. Doctorow. For more on these and other new titles, go read our latest book preview.
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Dispatch from Spain
Over at the Literary Hub, Valerie Miles writes about the life and work of Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes. His forthcoming novel On the Edge is the first of his books to be translated into English and one of the most anticipated books of 2016.