The latest episode of WNYC’s Soundcheck features Jennifer Egan discussing her rock-inflected novel A Visit from the Goon Squad and Bookslut’s Michael Schaub talking up other “essential rock fiction.” (Thanks, Derek)
Reading and Rock and Roll
“It is difficult to make a living”
“There is a possibility of your having a decent attitude toward people and work. That alone may make a man of you.” Wise words from Sherwood Anderson.
RIP Elizabeth Jane Howard
British novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard has died at the age of 90. She was famous for The Cazalet Chronicles and her literary love affairs with Kingsley Amis (one of her three husbands), Cecil Day-Lewis, and Arthur Koestler. Despite that her writing career spanned 60 years, she admitted that she found writing frightening in a recent interview. "You’ve got to be pretty nervous about the challenge, the blank page – anything could be on it, it could be crap or it could be wonderful."
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Turn to Page 394
We lost another great one this week in Alan Rickman. He will be remembered forever by fans of the Harry Potter series as the maybe-evil, maybe-heroic professor Severus Snape, but the Potter series wasn't Rickman's only brush with the literary. Here are a few recordings of him reading from Shakespeare, Proust, and Thomas Hardy.
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Van Doren’s Shakespeare Giveaway
Trevor Berrett, the man behind The Mookse and the Gripes, and now The Worlds and Works of Shakespeare, is conducting a giveaway for the NYRB Classics edition of Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare. Conditions to enter are enumerated on his blog, which you should certainly bookmark if you’re a fan of the Bard.
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Brief Encounters with Sayrafiezadeh
Hot on the heels of our own review of Brief Encounters with the Enemy, Full-Stop publishes an interview with Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. What makes it especially interesting, however, is that their interviewer is Scott Cheshire, who also wrote our review.
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