Attention New York-based readers: This Friday evening at 7:00, The Millions staff writer Edan Lepucki will read from her novella If You’re Not Yet Like Me at Book Court bookstore in Brooklyn. Joining her will be fellow Flatmancrooked author Shya Scanlon, who will read from his novel, Forecast. Don’t miss it!
Flatmancrooked Reading in Brooklyn
Charles Dickens’s Mistress
All six of the forthcoming films previewed by The Week’s Kerensa Cadenas look outstanding, but of particular relevance to Millions readers is The Invisible Woman. The film, which is an adaptation of Claire Tomalin’s biography of the same name, follows the life of Ellen “Nelly” Ternan (Felicity Jones), an actress who met Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) and became his secret mistress.
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Tough Sell
Did Patrick Modiano deserve the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature? Wrong question, our own Bill Morris writes in The Daily Beast. The right question is: Why is foreign fiction in translation still such a tough sell for American publishers?
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Reading Under the Influence
In general, it’s not much fun to read a book you don’t feel like reading — especially if that book is Antigone, you’re on Dexedrine, and you are Marilyn Monroe.
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The Importance of Being Oscar
A new Oscar Wilde letter has been discovered, in which he advises a Mr. Morgan to “make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you.”
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Steal This Record
Elvis Costello is calling the hefty price tag on his new box set “either a misprint or a satire” and advising fans to buy a Louis Armstrong box set or to wait until the discs included in his own box set are availble at a cheaper price “assuming that you have not already obtained them by more unconventional means.”
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The Quest to Write In Other Languages
A writer in both Italian and Arabic, Amara Lakhous writes on linguistic “polygamy” and her desire to become a trilingual writer. Pair with Hannah Gersen’s Millions piece on reading the English translation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words.