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
Something Borrowed, Something Stolen
Is Kenneth Goldsmith continuing to lead the charge in a revolutionary poetry movement? Has he overstepped his bounds? Is conceptual poetry dead? Alec Wilkinson for The New Yorker and Cathy Park Hong for The New Republic offer their opinions.
For Your Delectation
Today's edition of Book Reviews Worth Reading: Kathryn Schulz's first official outing as the book critic for New York Magazine (on the late Anthony Shadid's House of Stone) and Anti-Matter author Ben Jeffery's take on Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory. (While you're at it, you might as well read Elaine Blair nailing Houellebecq at the NYRB (in the second-best possible way)...or our own Bill Morris' défense.
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Musical Theories
We’ve written a fair bit about the By the Book series at the Times. You can read a selection of the best entries in a collection published by the paper. This week, the series featured another novel guest: Alan Gilbert, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Sample quote: “I don’t seek out books about music. I’ve read them over the years, but somehow, as a genre, it isn’t something I am specifically looking for.”
Stop reading this immediately
"Internet reading takes up my time without my setting that time aside for it, and fills me with images and thoughts that I don’t perceive going in, like radiation... In these online minutes or hours, I drift along with my mouth open, absorbing whatever’s floating by, never chewing or even swallowing, just letting it all seep pre-chewed into me": an elegant argument against reading about books before you read the books in question at Electric Literature. (But we hope you'll continue to read The Millions anyway.)
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Brief Likenesses
“Armand’s characters all seem both hugely present and in life’s juice and simultaneously dead, as if rent of brain, nerves, chest, stomach, intestines … Without gods and devils these patients feel that only fire can save them, existing eternally unless burned away.” Australian novelist Louis Armand’s newest, Abacus, is reviewed by Richard Marshall at 3:AM Magazine.
Required Listening
In response to Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s argument that we should end high-school reading lists, our own Nick Ripatrazone defended reading lists here at The Millions. Now, on New Hampshire Public Radio, the two take the debate to the airwaves. (Bonus: Year in Reading alum Sam Lipsyte makes a cameo.)
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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.