A group at NYU’s journalism school has named “The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States.” Four of these are books: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family, Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed.
The Top Journalism of the Decade
Oxford Marginalia Group
Recommended reading: Lauren Collins writes for The New Yorker about the Oxford University Marginalia group and the fate of bookish scribblings.
Joan
Sara Davidson’s Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion is an intimate portrait of one of America’s most revered and private writers.
●
●
A Matter of Time
Does literature have to be timeless? Over at Electric Literature, Kevin Pickard debates pop culture references in novels. Pair with Bill Morris’s Millions essay on books about the near future.
●
●
Now Serving: A Delicious Slice of the Blogosphere
The ever-entertaining writers at The Bygone Bureau have published their very first ebook, a collection of food writing chronicling everything from a Micronesian pig roast to a Chilean bread riot titled The Biggest Yam.
●
●
Au Revoir, Harry
While we’re on the subject of Harry Potter, I have some bad news. According to J.K. Rowling herself, Cursed Child is likely the last we’ll ever see of the boy (now middle-aged) wizard: “He goes on a very big journey during these two plays and then, yeah, I think we’re done. This is the next generation, you know … So, I’m thrilled to see it realized so beautifully but, no, Harry is done now.”
●
●
Jack Kerouac’s Journals
It’s hard to resist reading others’ diary entries, especially when the diaries in question belong to famous writers. Now that a selection of Jack Kerouac‘s journals is being released from The New Yorker archives and made available online, resistance is more or less futile. Originally published in 1998, these journal entries span the years from 1948 to 1950, from just after the long drive that inspired On the Road to the publication of Kerouac’s first book, The Town and the City.
●
●
20 Writers to Watch
Another response to The New Yorker‘s 20 under 40 list, this time from Dzanc Books. Dzanc polled “nearly 100 independent publishers, agents, editors, bloggers and reviewers” and went through two rounds of voting to come up with 20 Writers to Watch: An Alternate List.
●
●