Some world literature links: Sign and Sight offers the best introduction to Herta Müller I’ve been able to find…The Complete Review gets the ball rolling on Roberto Bolaño’s (very) early novel Monsieur Pain, forthcoming from New Directions…Ingo Schulze, author of the quietly astonishing New Lives and the forthcoming One More Story, talks to The Toronto Star (via)…The NBCC features Yu Hua‘s Brothers…Claudio Magris is crowned the king of Frankfurt…Maud Newton hails Juan Gabriel Vásquez‘s “inventive and intricately plotted” The Informers…The Brooklyn Rail and Transcript both offer handsome online digests of short stories from around the world.
World Literature Dispatches
Jon Cotner’s Floating World
As part of the River to River Festival, poet Jon Cotner has put together a “floating world,” or a map of Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō’s work transposed onto Rockefeller Park. Each hour, Cotner will lead a tour through the world. This isn’t the first time Cotner’s done something cool like this, either. Check out our dispatch from his “Poem Forest” last year.
Literary Daddy Issues
Writing in The Guardian, Colm Tóibín explores the “inspiring, rivalrous, Oedipal” relationships between authors and their parents. The article’s been adapted from his forthcoming book, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families
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Tournament of Books Zombie Round
After three years of judging, and now “like one of those guys who comes back after graduation and loiters creepily around campus, remembering [his] faded glory days,” our site’s editor-in-chief C. Max Magee finally made it into the booth for the zombie round in The Morning News‘ Tournament of Books. Check out the perils of “the ARC onslaught” and which books were missing from the tournament altogether.
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Hemingway Hijinks
Just in case you didn’t know, Mallory Ortberg gives you ways to tell if you’re in a Hemingway novel at The Toast. “Everyone you know respects you. This disgusts you.”
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Canon Fodder
I know, I know – another piece about “the canon.” This one, however, is sure to elicit a response one way or another. A sampling: “There are few (arguably no) female poets writing in Chaucer’s time who rival Chaucer in wit, transgressiveness, texture, or psychological insight. The lack of equal opportunity was a tremendous injustice stemming from oppressive social norms, but we can’t reverse it by willing brilliant female wordsmiths into the past. Same goes for people of color in Wordsworth’s day, or openly queer people in Pope’s, or …”
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Dirty or Poignant?
At The Rumpus, a new piece by Emily Rapp, who details the effect her son’s terminal illness had on her relationships with others.
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Softcore No More
“Pornography has changed unrecognizably from its so-called golden age—the period, in the sixties and seventies, when adult movies had theatrical releases and seemed in step with the wider moment of sexual liberation, and before V.H.S. drove down production quality, in the eighties. Today’s films are often short and nearly always hard-core; that is, they show penetrative sex. Among the most popular search terms in 2015 were ‘anal,’ ‘amateur,’ ‘teen,’ and—one that would surely have made Freud smile—’mom and son.'” The New Yorker attempts to make some sense of modern pornography.
Tuesday New Release Day: Doerr; Galchen; Cunningham; Barry; Gay; D’Erasmo; Heller; Deuel
New this week: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr; American Innovations by Rivka Galchen; The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham; The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry; An Untamed State by Rumpus editor and Year in Reading alum Roxane Gay; Wonderland by Stacey D’Erasmo; The Painter by Peter Heller; and Friday Was the Bomb by Millions contributor Nathan Deuel.
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