A.S. Byatt’s new novel The Children’s Book has won a ton of praise overseas – it may take home the Booker tonight — and now it’s finally available in the States. Meanwhile, Michael Chabon is trying his hand at memoir with his new book, Manhood for Amateurs.
This Week’s New Releases
Wells Tower’s Fairy Tale
Recommended Viewing: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned author Wells Tower reads an original fairy tale entitled, “The Chinese Person.”
The Anti-Tolkien
Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings: “a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class”? Michael Moorcock thinks so.
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George Saunders on Stories as Laboratories of Connection
George Saunders discusses his newest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and the connections that spring up from storytelling.
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I Guess There Could Be More Intersections, Too
Imagine a Venn Diagram with two circles: Paul Murray and John Jeremiah Sullivan. Now imagine its intersection. Did you think of Axl Rose? You should’ve.
9.5 Pornographic Fairy Tales
This interview with Joanna Walsh, creator of the #Readwomen Twitter account and fiction editor at 3:AM Magazine, is just plain fun. In it, Walsh touches on nearly everything from sex writing to Sigmund Freud to the Marx Brothers.
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Between Life and Death
Over at the Public Domain Review, Sharon Ruston examines the scientific background to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, from resuscitation to galvanism.
Truth with a Dragon
Jeff Vandermeer writes for the Los Angeles Times about autobiographical influence in fantasy and sci-fi and argues that “there’s little or no difference in process or results compared to “normal” fiction, except that sometimes you end up with a dragon in your story and sometimes you don’t.” Pair with Alex Trivilino‘s account of “binge-reading” Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy.
Melville the Whale
To honor Herman Melville for making the great white whale a metaphor for the inscrutable and unknowable, a prehistoric leviathan now bears his name. (Thanks, Kevin)
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