New Yorker contributors – including a couple of participants in our “Year in Reading” series – offer a predictably thoughtful and heterodox guide to the best books they read this year.
A Year in Reading from The New Yorker
Jane Austen in New York
At the Morgan Library in NYC: “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen‘s Life and Legacy.” Read the NY Times review of the show here. And, if your hankering for eighteenth and early nineteenth century English art isn’t sated by the Austen, the Morgan is also offering “William Blake‘s World: ‘A New Heaven Is Begun'”.
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On Leading the Tiger
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Society of Authors Speaks Out Against Publishers
The ongoing Hachette vs. Amazon feud has writers and publishers up in arms, but according to the Society of Authors there are no heroes in publishing.
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Who Should Readers Root For In The Super Bowl?
Need a team to root for during today’s Super Bowl? Might I suggest cheering on the team that represents a city angling to become America’s second UNESCO City of Literature? (Related: A few months back, Krakow, Poland, became the seventh city to join the UNESCO bunch.)
Boiled Down
“Like reading, love works in roughly the same way every time, but the details of any given case are irreducibly particular, and it’s in the details that everything happens.” Lidija Haas on Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot. (You could also read our review by Virginia Marshall.)
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Chasing After Literature
What is it like to work for a major book publisher? In an excerpt from the new reprint of her My Misspent Youth, Meghan Daum discusses the myth of the glamorous editorial job, one in which no time is wasted reading self-help books and unauthorized biographies of cable stars. As she explains it, “We’re secretaries fully versed in Derrida, receptionists who have read Proust in French.” Also check out our own Hannah Gersen’s review of Daum’s latest essay collection The Unspeakable.
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