Bone Worship is Hot
Dear Matthew Specktor
Thanks to Stephen Elliot‘s Letters in the Mail project, LARB senior editor Matthew Specktor finds himself admiring the gorgeous handwriting of strangers, feeling tickled and gobsmacked, and reflecting on letter writing as something “beautifully useless to do.”
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In Defense of Unread Books
According to Karen Hopkin, a house full of books—whether they're read or not—enhances intellectual capacity and literary habits.
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PW on Author Podcasts
Publishers Weekly talks up author podcasts “as a viable and entertaining marketing tool,” including Brad Listi’s Other People (which recently featured our own Edan Lepucki), Tom Lutz’s Los Angeles Review of Books, and Book Soup alum Tyson Cornell’s company Rare Bird Lit.
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Teju Cole on the Leonard Lopate Show
Something you should hear: Open City author and prolific tweeter Teju Cole on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show.
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On Sweet Valley, On Nancy Drew
Over at The Believer, Amy Benfer pens a paean to the serial novels of her youth. “They are the training bras of literature; books that teach young girls how to be older girls before they get there,” Benfer writes.
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Perfectly Imperfect Proust
In a piece for the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik writes about a new life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff, the first translator of Proust into English, and about the strange success and beauty his imperfect translation of Remembrance of Things Past achieved. The essay as a whole pairs well with both our own Bill Morris‘s essay against literary biography and Barclay Bram Shoemaker‘s Millions review of Mo Yan‘s Frog and “the trouble with translation.”
Loved the post! Now I want to go buy the book. I shared the post link on my Facebook as “When bad titles happen to good authors.”
*chuckle*
Thanks, David! I hope you like the book. Even if it isn’t a porno. ;-)
As a quick follow-up, I’m on the final chapters now, and I really like this book. I’m not a very good book reviewer, but I’ll say that the narrative switches between 1st person for the main plot, and third person for the narratives of times gone by, and the mechanic works very well. The book is very believable; it feels very real. Well done, Ms. Eslami, well done.