If you haven’t been following The Morning News Tournament of Books, now is the time to catch up. There’s been ample drama and the always insightful commentary from the booth. The finalists are set – Wolf Hall and The Lacuna – and the champion will be revealed on Monday.
The Rooster Culminates
Chicken-or-Egg Conundrum
Recommended Reading: This piece by Elisa Gabbert at Guernica Magazine in which she questions whether certain ideas can survive new shifts in language. It’s too bad she didn’t write it in emoji.
Dylan Thomas, Rediscovered
A poem by Dylan Thomas, “A Dream of Winter,” has been rediscovered after 70 years. Celyn Jones, who acted as Thomas in Set Fire to the Stars, will perform the poem in London tomorrow. We wrote about the the power of reading poetry aloud and how it connects us to the dead.
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“More allegorical than real”
Recommended Reading: Deborah Friedell on Ian McEwan’s The Children Act.
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The Confessions of Bill Styron
Now that you can purchase the letters of William Styron, you can note how especially funny (and sad) it is that Darkness Visible, the author’s book-of-self-help-slash-memoir-slash-confession, sold well enough to overshadow the novels that made his name.
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Pshaw! Gulp! Excelsior! Ach!
For 50 years, The New York Review of Books has written some of the best headlines in the business. Matthew Howard rounds up every headline. Our favorites include: “Don’t Sing Your Crap,” “How Unpleasant to Meet Mr. Baudelaire!“, “Welcome to New Dork,” “It’s Your Fault, Henry James,” and “Portrait of the Artist as a Paradox.”
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Appearing Elsewhere
My piece in memory of novelist and rapier-tongued pundit Gore Vidal, who died Tuesday, appears on Prospero, the online arts & culture publication of The Economist.
Thanks for the reminder–I lost track of it this week. Andrew W.K. is now on my shit list for that lazy judgment. I’d be fine with either book advancing (though I’m a big Marlon James fan), but his reasons for going with Wolf Hall were silly, and I agree with the commentators: did he actually read the novels?