Phillip Roth wins the Man Booker International prize (a lifetime achievement award that’s a recent invention) and one of the judges steps down in protest. “I don’t rate him as a writer at all.”
Those Brits and Their Book Awards
Deft, Masterful
Passionate, intense, fearless … this essay on the history of book blurbs will have you positively clawing yourself with pleasure. We’ve blurbed about blurbs a couple of times here at The Millions.
1000!
This weekend we posted our 1000th Tumbl. Since we jumped into the Tumblverse last autumn, we’ve been pretty vocal about how happy we are to be there, posting other curiosities, #LitBeat reports, the occasional cute puppy astronaut picture, and other digital ephemera. Of course, we wouldn’t love Tumblr half so hard if we were there on our lonesome; that’s why we made that handy guide to the other lit-loving Tumblogs that make our day on the regular.
The War on Baby Girls
We’re headed toward a future with a “biologically unnatural excess of males,” writes Nicholas Eberstadt. Indeed, “It’s a girl” can be recognized among “the three deadliest words in the world.”
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Lucky Writers
Catherine Banner writes on the “privilege and luck it takes to live the writer’s life.” Pair with this Millions essay on not quitting the writing life.
The Peripatetic
Over the past fifteen years, Mohsin Hamid has moved from New York, to London, and to Lahore, Pakistan, with stints in Italy and Greece. His new book, which came out yesterday, is a series of essays about his odyssey across the world, chronicling his observations and experiences that led him to move. At Bookforum, a review by Jake Lamar.
“There’s your enemy in bed beside you”
In The New York Times, T.C. Boyle tells Andrew Goldman about his pact with his wife (who “rarely leaves the couch”) and his view of writers who date other writers (dim). The author came out with a new novel, San Miguel, in September.
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