Don DeLillo’s slim new volume Point Omega is out. The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece on DeLillo that explains how the movie Psycho helped inspire the book. Also new this week is Louise Erdrich’s new novel Shadow Tag
Tuesday, New Release Day
Rumaan Alam on Genre Snobbery
Rumaan Alam discusses his suspenseful new book, Leave the World Behind, and the efficiency of genre writing.
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Reichenbach Pilgrimage
“I am lately returned from a pilgrimage, bearing bloodied knees and a holy relic; my destination was a place of love and sacrifice that’s lived long in my heart. No Lourdes for me, though: I went to the Reichenbach Falls.” Sarah Perry makes a pilgrimage to the death place of Sherlock Holmes and writes about it for the Guardian.
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The Irish Console The Irish
Over at Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Nick Curley prescribes “five passages from great Irish writers” as a means of coping with Notre Dame’s recent loss to Alabama in the college football BCS National Championship Game.
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Words for Cash
Tim Parks takes a look at recent literary history and sincerely asks, does money make us write better? Supplementary reading: Nick Ripatrazone’s look into the economy of literary magazines.
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New York Magazine Previews the Fall
In New York Magazine, critic Sam Anderson offers a list of this fall’s Most Anticipated Books. (We posted our own in July.)
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Fictional Texts
“Each imaginary book is a demonstration of fiction’s magic, as an author deposits into a fictional world yet another fictional world, like one universe bubbling out of another.” On Borges and other authors’ fictional texts and his library of imaginary books. Jeff Peer introduces us to Borges as a professor in his review of Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature.
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