Ron Charles, the WaPo’s fiction critic and the witty and winning originator of the “video book review” genre, gets profiled in Publishers Weekly.
“I run around my house with bacon on my head and Sam Tanenhaus is sending me notes.”
A Daisy Chain of Laffs
Turns out David Sedaris loves The Onion (but who doesn’t, really?). Slate asked more than 30 writers including Junot Díaz, Elif Batuman, Paul Beatty, Miranda July, and Chris Kraus to recommend their favorite funny books. Might we recommend you pair this with our own Jacob Lambert‘s comedic interpretation of Cormac McCarthy?
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The Best of Young Brazil
“Tracing the journey of a mediocre actor and Holocaust survivor ‘touched by some mysterious higher design’ as he forges and impersonates his way through the war and then back to the city of his birth, the story is part Samuel Beckett and part Isaac Bashevis Singer, with a sudden final bolt of O. Henry. It has the flavour of a morality tale, but what’s most fascinating to me is how difficult it is to derive a moral from it, or rather how easy it is to derive more than one and how openly they stand in conflict with each other.” Kevin Brockmeier extols the fiction of Leandro Sarmatz.
No Multiverse For Old Men
Recommended Reading: This dizzying essay from Seb Sutcliffe at 3:AM Magazine on quantum theory in the world of the Coen Brothers. Here’s a complementary essay from The Millions on DVD commentary and paratext novels.
Sinking (and Swimming) as a Debut Novelist
At The Nervous Breakdown Marie Mutsuki Mockett writes about being uninvited from a reading in New York and other obstacles to promoting her first novel, and how she channeled her creativity to take charge of her own PR.
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War and Peace and the Gita
Recommended reading: The New York Review of Books reviews at Richard Davis‘s The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography and the way centuries of politics can alter our interpretations of religious texts.
Fantastical Fowl
What’s the deal with all the fake birds animated into fantasy and sci-fi films these days? According to Brian Thill, these digital flocks “aren’t just there to make the unreal scenes feel a bit more real” but are rather signifiers of “our oldest and most common metaphor for freedom.” What to make of their ability to evade disaster or succumb to it, however, is another story entirely.
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The Mockingbird Lives
HarperCollins has announced that it will offer its trade paperback of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird at a discounted price to schools. This came as a response to the discontinuation of the mass-market paperback edition published by Hachette.
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