For its spring issue, the Paris Review will be publishing Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich—its first serialized novel in forty years—with original illustrations by Leanne Shapton. It’s a chance to discover Bolaño’s famous lost novel almost a year before it appears in book form.
Paris Review to Publish Bolaño
Football Fiction
Recommended Listening: Michael Nye reading his new short story about a former NFL lineman, “Beauty in the Age of Chaos and Savagery,” for The Kenyon Review. For more Nye, read his 2013 Year in Reading post.
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“Was it a vision, or a waking dream?”
Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch performed a haunting interpretation of “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats, and the actor has also recently signed on to play Hamlet on the London stage in autumn 2014. This raises the question: is Cumberbatch the British James Franco?
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Paying Hommage
There’s a new literary magazine on the digital shelves. The Neu Jorker is “an hommage d’triomphe” to a magazine with an eerily similar name.
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Us vs. Them
When The New York Times tried to ask Jhumpa Lahiri what immigrant fiction inspired her, she smacked the question down by saying there is no such thing as immigrant fiction. “If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn’t agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.”
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New DeLillo
Details are just now starting to trickle out about a new Don DeLillo book out early next year. In Point Omega, DeLillo “takes on the secret strategist in America’s war machine,” according to publisher Scribner.
Ugh. Another Bolano novel already? Can we finally agree that Bolano is the most over-hyped writer of the decade?
In the grand scheme of things (i.e. literature), he’s a middling talent at best.
Surely Bolano is less ‘over-hyped’ than other authors covered by The Millions? It’s easy to deem an author ‘middling talent’ from the peanut gallery of internet comments. I agree that there is some serious trendiness in the regard given to Bolano by websites like this or Quarterly Conversation, html giant, etc –and something cynical about the industry that’s grown around his work — but if the author that’s over hyped is the author of 2666 I think that’s pretty encouraging for literature [insert Franzen jibe here]. Who would you prefer to be ‘hyped’?
If you read Spanish that novel has been available for awhile now. (I don’t, unfortunately.) Just started a subscription to The Paris Review and am looking forward to this serial.
Middling? 2666. The Savage Detectives. Distant Star. Antwerp. By Night in Chile. I can’t think of half a dozen living American novelists with a comparable list of masterpieces.