I can’t recommend John Jeremiah Sullivan‘s 7,000-word article on The Pale King highly enough – not because he gets everything right, but because it’s what long-form writing about books should look like: passionate, lucid, wide-ranging, and awfully fun to read. I salute GQ for running it, and hope to see more literary coverage there in the future.
…And If You Still Want More on The Pale King
“No writer needs to be all the writers all the time”
Zadie Smith in conversation with Édouard Louis for the Document Journal. “Listening to the novelists Édouard Louis and Zadie Smith in conversation inspires a kind of hushed glee, a bliss familiar to eavesdroppers who encounter sublime discourse. ” How can you resist?
New Releases Tuesday
Today sees the arrival of a unique title from the Center for the Art of Translation. Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed provides translated poetry and fiction from 30 writers and is meant to introduce English-speaking readers to writers whose work would otherwise be difficult or impossible to find in English. Elsewhere, the biggest literary release of the week is Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, which has caused no small amount of consternation among critics, and Alice Munro’s latest collection, Too Much Happiness, which can be expected to be more warmly received. On the non-fiction side, a new collection of Zadie Smith essays came out last week.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Ephron, Alarcón, Dorst/Abrams, Dickinson
New this week: The Most of Nora Ephron; At Night We Walk in Circles by New Yorker 20 Under 40er Daniel Alarcón; S., a novel written by Doug Dorst in collaboration with J.J. Abrams (which naturally has a trailer); and The Gorgeous Nothings, a full-color facsimile of poems that Emily Dickinson drafted on the backs of envelopes. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.
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Pop Quiz, Hot Shot
In celebration of Bloomsday, The Guardian tests your Joyce knowledge with “16 questions for 16 June.” Pair with novelist Henriette Lazaridis‘s remembrance of Bloomsdays past.
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No Bastion for Books
“She gathered books to display for attendees and discovered that inside the cover of one, ‘The Koran for Dummies,’ someone had written “lies cover to cover,” drawn a swastika and made a disparaging remark about the Prophet Muhammad.” The president of the American Library Association reports “startling increases” in 2016 of vandalism, including hateful messages, at libraries. The Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has begun formally tracking such incidents to determine whether the increase is “a blip or a trend.”
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Also, Lev Grossman has a relatively lengthy rave in this week’s Time: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2062341,00.html
Great read. Almost as good as your NY Mag piece, Garth.