Contrasting takes on Peter Carey‘s Parrot & Olivier in America, from Open Letters Monthly and…er, The Onion.
Peter Carey Point-Counterpoint
This Week In Good People
In Bogotá, Colombia, a garbage collector by the name of Jose Gutierrez has been working tirelessly to rescue thrown-away children’s books for use in his homemade community library. If this doesn’t immediately call to mind Bohumil Hrabal’s classic Too Loud a Solitude, then it might be time for a re-read. Also, check out this Millions essay by John Yargo on Hrabal’s rambling fiction.
Mark It Up
Recommended Reading: Laura Miller’s argument for writing in books. You could also read Sam Anderson’s marginalia in Dan Brown’s Inferno, as well as his Year in Marginalia from 2010.
Hard to Recall
“Thinking about her life is like sifting ashes. You believe you see the clear outline of a message, but it inevitably disintegrates before you can be sure of its sense. The mantle of a ‘rediscovered writer’ has never settled firmly around [her] shoulders; she has a way of resisting the platitudes of remembering.” Michelle Dean on the writer Nella Larsen.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Atwood; Watkins; Walsh; Jollimore; Coetzee; Kurtz; Myles; Levi
New this week: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood; Gold, Fame, Citrus, by Claire Vaye Watkins; Vertigo by Joanna Walsh; Syllabus of Errors by Troy Jollimore; The Good Story by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz; I Must Be Living Twice by Eileen Myles; and The Complete Works of Primo Levi. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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Sun Ra’s Avant Poetics
UbuWeb has posted an excellent collection of avant jazz and poetry from Sun Ra and his famed Arkestra. Much of the suite dates from a 1977 on-air performance in Philadelphia. (Bonus: An excerpt from “At Sun Ra’s Grave” by Jake Adam York.)
HBD EB!
Happy first birthday to Emily Books! The Observer ran a little recap of the book club-slash-store’s lascivious first anniversary party, where Kate Zambreno and Tamara Faith Berger both read from their recent novels. Here’s the Million’s interview with Zambreno, and here’s a #LitBeat from one of Berger’s previous readings from her steamy wonder of a novel, Maidenhead.
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