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
Discussing Knausgaard
“Knausgaard‘s work is literary because of what it does, but not because of how it’s written. He gets us all asking…where does my truth really lie?” Recommended listening: James Wood, Meghan O’Rourke and Bill Pierce discuss Knausgaard in a podcast for Open Source.
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Similar-Sounding Names: A Conundrum
For The Atlantic, Nina Martyris examines books that are rife with characters with similar-sounding names, including One Hundred Years of Solitude and Anna Karenina.
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Remembering Tomie dePaola
Naomi Fry reflects on celebrated children's writer and illustrator Tomie dePaola, the author of more than 270 works for children.
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Harvard University Press’s Redistribution of Wealth
Flushed with cash after the runaway success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the Harvard University Press has decided to offer a 20% discount off two dozen works on capitalism and its discontents. Get to it while the gettin’s good.
Amazon: criticism you can count on
A study of the top 100 non-fiction titles between 2004 and 2007, and the major media and Amazon reviews for each title, yields some fascinating results: “experts and consumers agreed in aggregate about the quality of a book.”