Using the only known painting of Jane Austen to try to find out what killed her.
What killed Jane Austen?
Tuesday New Release Day: Williams; Tan; Bennett; Winter; Pollock; Watson; Cannon; Karlsson
Out this week: Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams; Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan; Pond by Claire Louise-Bennett; Break in Case of Emergency by Jessica Winter; The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock; Miss Jane by Brad Watson; The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon; and The Invoice by Jonas Karlsson. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
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Lev Grossman on Aspiring Writers
Lev Grossman offers some words of encouragement for aspiring writers: “because it turns out that talent, whatever that is, and that glowy aura, are only part of the picture.”
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Tala Tubaris
Want to be as brilliant as Jonathan Swift? Try reading Latin for ten hours a day. As this New Statesman review of Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World makes clear, the satirist went through a backbreaking classics regimen at Kilkenny College in Ireland. (There’s also the fact that he wrote constant letters to a sickly female confidante.)
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Killing History
Over at the Slate Book Review, Laura Miller gives Bill O’Reilly’s Killing series a fair shake. From Jesus to Reagan, O’Reilly and his cowriter Martin Dugard have killed off five famous historical “Great Men.” Despite claims of some dubious assertions having been made throughout the series, the books themselves have enjoyed tremendous commercial success.
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The Portable Betty Draper
The literary lineage of Mad Men‘s Betty Draper extends to Edith Wharton and Margaret Mead, argues Laura Tanenbaum in a new issue of Open Letters Monthly.