Susannah Hunnewell interviews Michel Houellebecq, France’s controversial literary icon, for The Paris Review’s “The Art of Fiction” series: “There is a need for intensity. From time to time, you have to forsake harmony. You even have to forsake truth. You have to, when you need to, energetically embrace excessive things.”
Michel Houellebecq on the Art of Fiction
Tennessee Williams’s College Days
The Strand Magazine is publishing a previously unseen Tennessee Williams short story in its spring issue. “Crazy Night” is about Williams’s lovelorn college days when he describes sex like “vaccination the first day of school.”
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Get out of the restaurant
Though excellent fiction has been staged in restaurants (Richard Russo’s Empire Falls comes to mind, as well as YA novel Hope was Here), I have to admit Rebecca Makkai at Ploughshares has a point that dining-in-public scenes are getting a bit old. “All the unfolding of napkins and poking at the French fries… it’s filler.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Dos Passos; Wagner
Out this week: a new e-book edition of The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos and The Empty Chair by Bruce Wagner.
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Decolonizing the Card Catalog
A Howard University librarian named Dorothy Porter made it her mission to collect and preserve works related to the global black experience.
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Reading Aloud and Clear
“My wife likes to drive. I like to read aloud. So, she takes me places, and I take her places. It’s a match made in heaven — or at least in a Honda.” In honor of World Read Aloud Day, book critic Ron Charles writes about his love of reading out loud for the Washington Post. Pair with: an essay about the importance of reading aloud as adults.
Tom Wolfe on “The Human Beast” and its Kingdom of Speech
Tom Wolfe’s next book will be a “nonfiction account of the animal/human speech divide,” reports Sarah Weinman. Presumably this effort – entitled The Kingdom of Speech – will be based on the author’s “Human Beast” lecture from 2006. (A lecture he went on to explicate in a 2008 interview with SF Gate.) Hopefully the Great White Suit’s return to straight nonfiction will prove more successful than his attempt at fictionalizing Miami last year.
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Oddest Titles of the Year
Nominees for The Bookseller Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year have been announced. My favorite, which to me is not odd at all actually, is Bacon: A Love Story. Scatology abounds in this list, including: Peek-a-poo:What’s in Your Diaper, and The Origin of Faeces.