This week brings the release of Michael Crichton’s posthumously published tale of the high seas, Pirate Latitudes and A Good Fall, a new collection of stories by Ha Jin. Also out recently is Melville House’s Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview.
New Releases: Crichton, Jin, Bolaño
Contested Accounts
After reading through two new biographies of Sylvia Plath — American Isis and Mad Girl’s Love Song — Terry Castle concludes that “nothing about her life or legacy seems wholesome or resolved.” (Related: our own Hannah Gersen talking with Pain, Parties, Work author Elizabeth Winder.)
Intersections and Turns
Recommended Reading: Noy Holland on writing fiction, a form rooted in deft timing, accidents, and revelations.
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The Apples Are a Gift
“This poem fosters reading again and again, because interpretation is always reaching its limits: eventually, one runs up against a secret gesture to which the only response is either to acknowledge that there is some other conscious being that could make or decipher it, or to fantasize the being that could.” A long, worthwhile review of R.F. Langley’s Complete Poems from 3:AM Magazine.
Finding the Words
At Louisiana Channel, Colm Tóibín discusses finding the perfect sentence to start your book. In honor of the Oscars, Bill Morris wrote about the adapted screenplay for Tóibín’s Brooklyn.
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Best Friends
“Three weeks before she died on July 25, 2012, Marcia (Marty) Brown Stern ’54 sent me a registered letter, which began, ‘What is enclosed may astonish you.’ Indeed it did. The envelope included a draft of ‘marcia,’ an unpublished poem that Sylvia Plath ’55 wrote about their sophomore year together at Smith College in 1951.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Dyer, Aira, Wilson, Iyer
Zona, Geoff Dyer’s book about Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, is out today. Also hitting shelves are César Aira’s Varamo, Adam Wilson’s Flatscreen, and Lars Iyer’s Dogma. We were looking forward to all four of these books to start the year.
Claudia Rankine on Seeking Shared Realities
Claudia Rankine discusses how her newest book of essays, poems, and images, Just Us: An American Conversation, does not seek out easy answers.
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Hollywood Horror
What if H.P. Lovecraft’s work were set in Hollywood instead of New England? At The Toast, Kevin Sharp writes Lovecraftian gossip columns. “Two very famous couples, both well known for their complicated personal lives and grand professional successes (less known, perhaps, for the horrid dark secrets that throb and scream in their antediluvian Hollywood mansions), met for a fateful dinner.”
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