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.”
Pictorial Gateways
What is the best approach for creating a book cover? Over at Capatult, Tanwi Nandini Islam considers the best book cover for her debut novel, Bright Lines. Also check out this comparison of U.S. and U.K. book covers.
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You ninnie-hammer flycatcher!
Short on insult fodder? In that case you’ll want to read Colin Burrow’s review of Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing. It includes such notables as: “slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubbardly lowts … slutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, [and] codshead loobies.” In the end, “swearing is one of the most basic human acts,” he writes.
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Non-Issues
“As a gay man, I would argue that gender and sexual identities are irrelevant, complete non-issues.” Alexandre Vidal Porto talks with our own Bruna Dantas Lobato about Brazilian fiction, gender identity, and his second novel, Sergio Y., at BOMB Magazine.
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What’s Important
The Los Angeles Review of Books looks at a new history of K Records, the influential Olympia, WA-label that gave us Beat Happening, Modest Mouse, and Kurt Cobain’s arm tattoo.
New Releases: Marias, Jansson
The new book release schedule is slow in December, but the third book in Javier Marías’ acclaimed Your Face Tomorrow trilogy is now out, Poison, Shadow, and Farewell. Also, new on shelves is The True Deceiver, a 1982 novel by the Finnish writer Tove Jansson from NYRB Classics.
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In Memoriam William Trevor
“To get me through a 550-page collection, the stories must be very good indeed. These are.” When Lionel Shriver participated in our Year in Reading ritual several years back, she dedicated her reading diary to William Trevor, who just passed away. “Trevor’s writing is so perfect that you don’t even notice it’s perfect,” she wrote. “He mainlines pure narrative directly into your veins. The words never get in the way; the words, like their author, disappear.”
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Hell is Other People
The Morning News posts a terrific (if slightly ingenuous?) take on the vacuity of the poet’s life in NYC: Frank O’Hara it ain’t. Whether this is a failure of the city, or merely of the poet, is an open question. (via The Book Bench).
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Tommy Pico on Being a Poem
"Shall I be a poem for you?" Tommy Pico asks in his latest book, Feed, an ode to reconciling life's wild inconsistencies.
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