Horacio Castellanos Moya, the author of Senselessness [review], again tackles the commodification of Roberto Bolaño, this time in a lengthy piece in Guernica. “It’s the landlords of the market,” he writes, “who decide the mambo that you dance.”
Castellanos Moya on the Bolaño Bubble, Part Two
“One story shook the Soviet Union.”
Writing for the BBC, Steve Rosenberg looks at the lasting impact and significance of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was published fifty years ago this month.
Huh. Who Knew?
“The Mariko Aoki phenomenon is a phenomenon consisting of the urge to defecate while visiting a bookstore. Originating in Japan, it is named for the woman who first publicized such an urge.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Vonnegut, Salinger, Crime-Fighting Victorian Women, and More
Lots of new books out this week: Where Mortals Sleep, previously unpublished short fiction by Kurt Vonnegut, with a foreword by Dave Eggers; A Life, one of what will be several biographies of J.D. Salinger arriving over the next couple of years; Stanley Fish tells us How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One; Brian Greene introduced the masses to string theory with The Elegant Universe, and now he's back with The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos; Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge is out in paperback; and finally, from Penguin Classics, The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime: Forgotten Cops and Private Eyes from the Time of Sherlock Holmes.
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One Kind of Coating
At Bookforum, Gee Henry talks with New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als, whose new collection of essays, White Girls, tackles subjects including Eminem, Truman Capote and Gone with the Wind. The writer also delves into his affection for André Leon Talley.
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Beautiful Banned Books
This is cool: in celebration of last week's Banned Books Week, Chapel Hill Public Library held a competition for local artists to create new work based on books that have been banned or challenged. Trading cards were printed from the winning selections, which you can see along with a gallery of all the entries.
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“The Book the Internet Was Invented For”
On the infinite recreation and reimagining of Finnegans Wake, a book that was "crying out for the invention of the web, which would enable the holding of multiple domains of knowledge in the mind at one time that a proper reading requires," from The Guardian.
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Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers
Do you love cats? Do you love Irish drinking songs? Do you love them together? Apparently, you are not alone. Marc Gunn of the Irish and Celtic Music Podcast has two parody albums devoted to this improbable marriage. Speaking for myself (in the words of the immortal Joe Turner), "I'm like a one-eyed cat, peeping in a seafood store..."
Love the sly “If he did take a lover…” lead about midway through the piece. Only time I’ve ever read anything about that, and odd in a piece of this tone and purpose.