Tonight at 8, the 92nd Street Y in New York hosts Millions favorite Péter Esterházy, author of the amazing Celestial Harmonies. András Schiff offers musical interludes. Look for an interview here in the next couple of weeks.
Esterházy in Manhattan
New Releases: The Classics
With the frenzied holiday season underway, there aren’t many new releases to look at this week, but there are some newly reissued classics hitting shelves. NYRB Classics has put out Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant and Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman. Vintage, meanwhile, has smart looking new editions of a pair of Somerset Maugham books: The Narrow Corner and A Writer’s Notebook.
Action!
Recommended Reading: This lengthy piece from The New York Times on the history of Yiddish theater from schtick to stardom.
Droit ou l’Ordre
Believe it or not, but the widely publicized murder case is not just a modern phenomenon. In 1761, Voltaire became obsessed with the case of Marc-Antoine Calas, a young man who was found dead in his home city of Toulouse. At The Paris Review Daily, a post on the Candide author’s impact on modern justice.
King James
“He is the king, after all, and kings don’t lead revolutions. They rule wary of them.” Just about everything that Rowan Ricardo Phillips has to say about basketball is recommended reading at this point, and this piece on Lebron James and kingship is no different. This older piece on Steph Curry and the sustainability of brilliance is an early highlight.
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A Dramatized Curiosity About Our Oceans
If this Curiosity was presented to you in person, it’d go like this: “Hey, Nick, you haven’t posted a beautiful video in a while.” “Oh, I’m sorry. Here’s a 1080p visualization of the ocean’s surface currents between 2005-2007. It looks like Van Gogh painted it.”
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Dorothy Parker Loses Her Day Job
Once upon a time, Dorothy Parker was fired from her post as theater critic for Vanity Fair for harsh reviews that upset the magazine's advertisers.
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Gone in the Dark
“And so the book we have available to us is not the one she intended for us to see — and to those who knew her only as the private spouse of a public figure, Michelle McNamara emerges from these pages as much of a mystery as the Golden State Killer does, gone in the dark.” In Vulture, a profile of the late true crime writer Michelle McNamara whose book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, was published last week. From our archives: an essay on why one writer reads true crime novels.
Tuesday New Release Day: Schwartz, Towles, Russell
New this week: John Burnham Schwartz follows up Reservation Road with Northwest Corner. Amor Towles debuts with a novel of New York society in the 1930s, Rules of Civility. And Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! is now out in paperback.