In light of Howard Jacobson’s victory for The Finkler Question, Laura Miller at Salon explains why the Man Booker Prize is the best of the literary awards.
In Praise of the Booker
The Power of Social Media (And Sexts)
Poet Elisa Gabbert recaps the warm-your-heart generosity of poet (and “Poet Laureate of Twitter”) Patricia Lockwood’s Twitter followers.
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Book(case) Criticism
Dispirited by the deluge of advance review copies and publishing mailers (a plight to which I can relate), Ron Charles decided to forego traditional book criticism for the time being and instead to focus on reviewing something more immediately practical: a bookcase.
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Finish that book. Finish that burrito.
Our own Mark O'Connell has an excellent piece over on The New Yorker's books blog detailing his propensity to abandon burritos books, even good ones, halfway through.
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Ye Olde Best Books
Of course this is always an ongoing discussion about which books will endure, and which books are the best. Such talk is fueled by annual “Best Of” lists. But what did that conversation sound like… in 1898?
Tuesday New Release Day: Agee; Mann; Cowley; Virgil; Szybist
Out this week: The Complete Journalism of James Agee; Straight Razor by Randall Mann; The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley; The Virgil Encyclopedia; and a new e-book edition of Incarnadine, the poetry collection by Mary Szybist that won this year’s National Book Award.
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Dirty or Poignant?
At The Rumpus, a new piece by Emily Rapp, who details the effect her son's terminal illness had on her relationships with others.
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Rainbow Reads
On the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, The Literary Hub has a list of eight books by LGBTQ authors from places where it's illegal to be gay, including Here Comes the Sun by Year in Reading alum Nicole Dennis-Benn.
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