Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit and Unbroken, discusses her life with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. “I’m looking for a way out of here. I can’t have it physically, so I’m going to have it intellectually. It was a beautiful thing to ride Seabiscuit in my imagination.”
Laura Hillenbrand
Tuesday New Release Day: Bachelder; Mendelsohn; Penkov; Yun; Dutton; McGuire
Out this week: The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder; Burning Down the House by Jane Mendelsohn; Stork Mountain by Miroslav Penkov; Shelter by Jung Yun; Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton; and The North Water by Ian McGuire. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
A to Z of the Shortest Book Titles
From Andy Warhol’s A to Vassilis Vassilikos’ Z (and now Tom McCarthy’s C), AbeBooks lists the shortest book titles.
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Gabriel García Márquez Can No Longer Write
Gabriel García Márquez can no longer write due to senile dementia, though “he still has the humour, joy and enthusiasm that he has always had,” announced Márquez’s brother.
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Teju’s Twitter
Yesterday, our own Elizabeth Minkel pondered if Twitter fiction could be real art. She cited Teju Cole, a literary Twitter master, but what does he have to say about how Twitter affects his writing? “My memory is worse than it was a few years ago, but I hope that my ability to write a good sentence has improved,” he told The New York Times.
Tuesday New Release Day
New releases this week are Lydia Davis’ new translation of Madame Bovary, Ingrid Betancourt’s memoir Even Silence Has an End, The Prizefighter and the Playwright, a book about the unlikely relationship between George Bernard Shaw and boxer Gene Tunney, and the poetry collection Human Chain by Nobel-Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney.
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Is It Now.
With texting and instant messaging perpetually on the rise, the world’s punctuation is starting to evolve. At The New Republic, Ben Crair identifies an odd new consequence of this change: the period is now a sign of anger.
Once more about Martin Amis, dear friends, once more
Did you dig Mark O’Connell’s review of Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo so much that you yearn for more? Well, here’s the author’s interview with Capital, and here’s Parul Sehgal’s take on how the book’s “taut mousetrap ready to go off” sadly “never snaps.”
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