Nelly Kaprielian parties with Michel Houellebecq after he wins the Goncourt: “‘After France, the world!’ jokes Beigbeder, and everybody’s quick to raise a glass.”
Partying with Houellebecq
New Dyer Book
Word of a new book from Millions fave Geoff Dyer has just emerged. (Edit: new in the U.S.; it’s been published previously in the U.K.) The Missing of the Somme, due in August, is a “meditation on World War I.”
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Littérature Québécois
Translator Peter McCambridge has recently launched Québec Reads, a webzine focused on reviews and excerpts of contemporary Québec fiction. (Bonus: our own Michael Bourne provides a “Beginner’s Guide to Canadian Lit.”)
Edan Lepucki Sells California
Congratulations to Millions staffer Edan Lepucki, who sold her debut novel California to Little, Brown at auction this week. The novel, which Edan refers to as “Novel #2” in her article “What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell,” will follow a young married couple grappling with a post-apocalyptic world. Consider us extra relieved given Edan’s proclamation in that article: “And this new book, it will be published. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll just die.”
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Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth
The film adaptation of Macbeth being helmed by Snowtown Murders director Justin Kurzel will star Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, reports Vulture. The movie will feature “Shakespeare’s original linguistic stylings” as well as “a visceral approach to the story including significant battle scenes,” and it is set to begin production this year.
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Baseball and Poetry: America’s Pastimes
Celebrate the start of baseball season and the beginning of National Poetry Month at the same time by reading Hobart’s annual Baseball Issue. This year, the site plans on rolling out “daily baseball stories, poems, essays, and other baseball miscellany,” so it’s pretty much the Venn diagram overlap of all of your April needs.
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Hierarchy of Book Publishing: The Top 100
Knopf publicity bigwig Paul Bogaards kindly plunked us onto his Hierarchy of Book Publishing: The Top 100. We’d note that we’re run out of basements throughout the NY-metro area (and not just NJ), but we’re too busy telling the Stieg Larsson estate to eat our dust.
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