Stephen King’s latest, Under the Dome, is out today. It’s 1,100 pages and is being compared to The Stand. Meanwhile, Generation A by Douglas Coupland is also hitting shelves. It’s a sequel to Coupland’s famous, influential debut, Generation X. Also out last week was Jonathan Safran Foer’s treatise on vegetarianism, Eating Animals, which picked up a mixed review in the New Yorker.
New Releases: Foer, Coupland, King
A Good Deaf Man Is Hard to Find
Sara Nović writes for The Believer about the deaf protagonist of Stephen King’s The Stand. As she explains it, “This is the plight of the average deaf character: to be plagued by the hearing author’s own discomfort with the idea of silence.” Pair with Lydia Kiesling’s Millions essay on King.
Hierarchy of Book Publishing: The Top 100
Knopf publicity bigwig Paul Bogaards kindly plunked us onto his Hierarchy of Book Publishing: The Top 100. We'd note that we're run out of basements throughout the NY-metro area (and not just NJ), but we're too busy telling the Stieg Larsson estate to eat our dust.
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Wodehouse Revival
P. G. Wodehouse is enjoying a popular revival thanks in part to W. W. Norton re-releasing some of his books with nice, attention-grabbing covers. Of course the British author has long had his supporters. Among them? George Orwell. Elsewhere, The Guardian compares Wodehouse's correspondence to Ernest Hemingway's.
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Wonders of Wonderbook
This one goes out to all the visual learners out there. Here's a helpful, illustrated guide to writing scenes and stories with Jeff VanderMeer, author of the bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy. Bonus: here's an interview by VanderMeer with author Richard House from earlier this year.
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So do we drop the ‘Y’ in YBA now?
Gearing up for his forthcoming retrospective at the Tate Modern, Damien Hirst told the Guardian that he "still believe[s] art is more powerful than money." This from the man whose tiger shark and formaldehyde sculpture "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" sold for $12 million-- the figure that Don Thompson reports in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark.
The Stories We Tell
Of more than 23,000 front-page articles that appeared in The New York Times between 1939 and 1945, only 26 were about the Holocaust. Watch a powerful 18-minute mini-documentary about "how and why the genocide of Jews was neglected and euphemised by the Times, and by extension, the American people." Pair with our piece about the German traditions of the Denkmahl and Mahnmahl, two different kinds of memorials with subtle, yet important distinctions.
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Reading Your Way to Sochi
Another day, another LARB piece about reading Russian fiction in conjunction with the Winter Olympics. (One particularly interesting earlier installment is over here.) Meanwhile, I offer a compendium of passages from the Russian masters, and use my favorite #SochiFails to illustrate them.
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