Check out this clever book trailer for the debut novel House of Tomorrow by Peter Bognanni.
Coming to a Bookstore Near You
Occupy and Occupy!
As the various Occupy protests endure another week, Todd Gitlin's excellent piece in the LA Review of Books is an eloquent exploration of what the movement means. Across the country, Brooklyn-based n+1's ambitious gazette, Occupy!, is available for free download (PDF).
Tot Tales
Have you ever wondered how memoirists remember their childhoods so well when we can barely remember what we ate for breakfast this morning? Although losing your earliest memories is a common phenomenon called childhood amnesia, we're more likely to remember childhood if we fashion it into a story.
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Out West
“At the outset, Nair is in Sierra Leone to keep tabs on his old friend and uses the occasion to practice a little freelance extortion, stealing unspecified multinational secrets on a flash drive and sending them back to his girlfriend in Amsterdam. The first 50 pages are like a Johnsonian take on Graham Greene’s humid morality-play potboilers. Nair keeps meeting shifty European acquaintances and distrusting everything they say.” John Lingan reviews Denis Johnson’s new novel.
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Sorkin Takes on Steve Jobs
The Social Network writer Aaron Sorkin has signed on to adapt a biopic about Steve Jobs (not to be confused with the Ashton Kutcher one) which will be based on Walter Isaacson’s biography of the same name. Meanwhile, as the news was announced, Sorkin gave a memorable commencement address at Syracuse University.
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Opiates
“The cause of death/was living/the immediate cause/of death was/living in Moscow.” At n +1's website, Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich excerpt their translations of the Soviet poet Vsevolod Nekrasov.
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Literature from the Forever Wars
"All war literature, across the centuries, bears witness to certain eternal truths: the death and chaos encountered, minute by minute; the bonds of love and loyalty among soldiers; the bad dreams and worse anxieties that afflict many of those lucky enough to return home." In an omnibus review for The New York Times Michiko Kakutani looks at the fiction and journalism being written about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including recent Year in Reading alum and National Book Award winner Phil Klay's Redeployment and Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War, "the one book that most fluently and kaleidoscopically captures both the micro and the macro of Iraq." She also wonders, and attempts to explain, "why has there been no big, symphonic Iraq or Afghanistan novel?"
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The Particular Pleasures of Literature
At 3 Quarks Daily, Akeel Bilgrami’s essay on the pleasures of literature: “To understand what is special about literature is not to delegate the emotions to literature while retaining thought for philosophy and science. The idea is to find in the distinctly expressive function of literature, a refusal of that tired dualism.” (via Book Bench)