Ben Greenman, a favorite around here, interviewed at Failbetter.
Ben Greenman Interviewed
What the Bestseller List Says about 2017
Slate books and culture columnist Laura Miller looks at what this year’s bestseller list tells us about 2017. One of her conclusions, “2017 was the year that the very concept of a best-seller became even more dubious.” After reading her analysis, check out our Year in Reading lists, whose authors found joy in reading and viewed it as one of the few good things of this year, even if the bestsellers of the year didn’t reflect those feelings.
The HemingWAY
James Salter reviews Paul Hendrickson‘s Hemingway’s Boat for The New York Review of Books. Relatedly, Helena Price has been using 1000memories to compile “memory pages” to “explore the life of Ernest Hemingway as well as his friends and family.” Of particular note is this poster imploring us to “Live the HemingWAY.” Also related, The Paris Review shares a letter from Papa to his sister Ursala Hemingway.
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Tuesday New Release Day
This week we have new on shelves: Julie Orringer’s hotly anticipated debut novel The Invisible Bridge; Meghan Daum’s memoir of real estate addiction Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, Private Life by Jane Smiley, and The Singer’s Gun by our own Emily St. John Mandel.
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Point Scoring
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Must be all that Schadenfreude
Eating your manuscript, deliberately slicing open your own head during a reading, titling your work “Baby Fucker.” These stunts are par for the course during the competition for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, a prestigious German literary award.
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