The King’s Speech is the first film to portray my speech defect realistically, says novelist David Mitchell.
David Mitchell on The King’s Speech
Working Title
Recommended Reading: Anna Aslanyan on the challenges of translation and the nonliteral titles of Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Pair with Janet Potter’s Millions guide to finding the perfect title for that book in your drawer.
Dreamweaver
For the most part, Tolstoy is known as a realist, despite his work’s occasional dips into fancy. Yet the plotlines of his great novels featured long and important dream sequences. In The New York Review of Books, Janet Malcolm argued that Tolstoy was a master of dreams, using Anna Karenina as proof.
Blood Roots
“[W]e are and we are not who our blood roots predetermine us to be.” Over at Electric Literature, Sion Dayson talks with our own Sonya Chung about race, writing, and her new novel, The Loved Ones, which is one of the books we’re most excited to read this month.
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NPR Commentator to Swim from Cuba to Key West
“More than 30 years after her last big swim, Diana Nyad is back in the water,” writes NPR’s Greg Allen. “Nyad, a former commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition, became well-known in the 1970s for her swim around Manhattan Island and, a few years later, for swimming from the Bahamas to Florida. Now, at age 61, she’ll soon be attempting a 103-mile swim from Cuba to Key West.” Unfortunately she’s already missed Key West’s Hemingway Days.
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The NYRB Mantle
The question of who will take over The New York Review of Books when Robert Silvers passes the torch is a good one. Surely it’s one of the most desirable jobs in all of publishing.
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Chandra on Hemingway
It’s no secret we enjoy and highly recommend The Atlantic‘s By Heart series, and Vikram Chandra‘s essay on reading Hemingway is no exception. Pair with Jonathan Goldman‘s review of a modern edition of The Sun Also Rises.
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On Reading and Personality Disorders
“Six thousand books is a lot of reading, true, but the trash like Hell’s Belles and Kid Colt and The Legend of the Lost Arroyo and even Part-Time Harlot, Full-Time Tramp that I devoured during my misspent teens really puff up the numbers. And in any case, it is nowhere near a record. Winston Churchill supposedly read a book every day of his life, even while he was saving Western Civilization from the Nazis. This is quite an accomplishment, because by some accounts Winston Churchill spent all of World War II completely hammered.”
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