Bone Worship is Hot
What’s Your Top 5?
We’ll be revealing the top 5 vote getters in our “Best Fiction of the Millenium (So Far)” poll on Thursday and Friday. We’d love to hear your predictions here.
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The Birth of Memory
“So a single image can split open the hard seed of the past, and soon memory pours forth from every direction, sprouting its vines and flowers up around you till the old garden’s taken shape in all its fragrant glory.” Read an excerpt from Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir at Longreads. Pair with Beth Kephart’s essay on how memoir can be a conversation between reader and writer.
New Fiction by a Classic Writer
New Directions has just released The Complete Stories of Brazilian legend Clarice Lispector, newly translated by Katrina Dodson and edited by Benjamin Moser. There are eight stories in the collection that had never before appeared in English: “Covert Joy,” “Remnants of Carnival,” “Brasília,” “Beauty and the Beast or The Big Wound, “One Day Less” (one of the two final stories left in manuscript at Lispector’s death), “Gertrudes Asks for Advice,” “Another Couple of Drunks,” and “The Escape.” Check out Magdalena Edwards‘s Millions review of the collection.
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Our Lucrative Profession
The folks at Harper’s Bazaar (not Harper’s Magazine) are launching a new short story competition, and the grand prize is wild: an all-expenses-paid weeklong stay on a private Scottish island, publication in the May 2014 issue of the magazine and a first-edition book from the Asprey’s Fine and Rare Books Department, worth up to £3,000. (And yes, that’s pounds, not dollars.)
The Value of Difficulty
“When we read a book that requires that effort — when the act of reading becomes rigorous and self-aware, rather than effortless and transparent — we get to have a history with what we’ve given ourselves to, a history etched into us by the demanding friction of its difficulty.” Zoë Heller and Leslie Jamison debate whether or not we overvalue difficult literature in The New York Times.
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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.