The New Yorker Book Bench has posted its 2010 Holiday Gift Guide.
Gifts for the Bookish
Reconstruction
Recommended Reading: On lyric essays and trauma at Ploughshares. “I didn’t start writing lyric essays until I found out I had cancer. The melanoma buried in my right cheek was at first missed, and then misdiagnosed in its severity. Clark’s stage IV, they told me. Likely in my lymph nodes, but they wouldn’t know until my third surgery, the excision and biopsy.”
●
●
A Strange Kind of Sense
“I’m fascinated by epigenetics. My father had polio that affected his left leg, and I walk with my left foot turned in for no good reason at all. I was attacked by a dog when I was ten, and both my daughters have an irrational fear of dogs. It makes a strange kind of sense.” Year in Reading alum Rebecca Makkai discusses Music for Wartime and her writing process with Christine Rice. We interviewed Makkai following the release of The Hundred-Year House.
●
●
Vintage Hemingway
The Toronto Star is re-releasing the columns Ernest Hemingway wrote for the paper in the early 1920s. I particularly recommend his column on bullfighting, “Bullfighting is Not a Sport – It is a Tragedy.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Eggers; Gaiman; Murphy, Upadhyay; Hastings
Dave Eggers has a new novel out this week, while Neil Gaiman has an illustrated version of a previously published story on shelves. Also out: I Love You More by Jennifer Murphy; The City Son by Samrat Upadhyay; and The Last Magazine by the late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings.
Quick Links
What happens when you co-write a book with someone who’s illiterate? YPTR has the details.LitLinks, a well stocked collection of links about a few hundred notable authors.iPoems arrives promising a plethora of downloadable poetry so you can jam to some verse on your iPod.
#LemonadeSyllabus
Beyoncé’s visual album/phenomenon Lemonade has only been out for a few days and already it has spawned countless thinkpieces. One of the best and most inspiring things to come out of it has been the #LemonadeSyllabus hashtag, popularized by Rutgers University educator Candace Benbow. The series “encourages Black women to share curated reading lists of books, poems and other inspirational literature penned by Black female authors that celebrate every aspect of what it means to be a Black woman.”