It almost sounds too terrifying to be true. Your book is reviewed by Christopher Hitchens in the New York Times Book Review and he opens with: “This is an extraordinarily irritating book” (and it gets worse from there, and deservedly so). It happened to David Mamet and his new book The Secret Knowledge.
Hitchens on Mamet
Smith Wins Bailey’s
Ali Smith's How to Be Both has won the Bailey's Prize for women's fiction, placing her in the same ranks as Zadie Smith and Lionel Shriver. If you're not too familiar with Smith's work, Jonathan Russell Clark wrote about her for The Millions last year.
Rereading Dostoevsky
David Denby wonders: After nearly 150 years have passed since its initial publication and countless imitators have blunted its artistic radicalism does Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground still pack a punch? For more contemporary readings of Dostoevsky, see Rob Goodman's recent article on forensics, The Brothers Karamazov and the death of the courtroom drama.
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Tom Hanks, Fiction Writer
Tom Hanks’s debut collection of short stories is due out in October. “The theme of the collection will be typewriters,” reports The Guardian, “with each tale involving one of these more and more scarce machines.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Eggers; Gaiman; Murphy, Upadhyay; Hastings
Dave Eggers has a new novel out this week, while Neil Gaiman has an illustrated version of a previously published story on shelves. Also out: I Love You More by Jennifer Murphy; The City Son by Samrat Upadhyay; and The Last Magazine by the late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings.
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Picture Books
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just released almost 400,000 high-resolution digital images of its collections. Among them are thousands of illustrations from bygone days when "picture books" were not for children alone. Pair with Buzz Poole's reviews of contemporary works of visual literature in The Millions archives, from hand-drawn self-help quotes to politically-charged images of transit in Tehran.
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Bigwig Book Collectors
Gary Shteyngart, Philip Pullman, James Wood, and three other literary bigwigs share their book-collecting habits.
A very colorful Queen!
Pantone has released a Queenly color wheel, made especially to mark Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee. The wheel is made up of the Pantone referents for the colors her Majesty has worn throughout her reign, and each chip bears a historical note on the particular hue's tie to her wardrobe. This is especially good news if, like Slate, you think that the Queen is the most fashionable woman in the world.
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Perhaps Mamet is writing some sly parody of right-winger thinking and we’re just not smart enough to get the joke. That’s what I’d like to believe.
That’s the thing about good parodies of crazy: You can’t tell them from the original. I kind of hope you’re right, Bat of Moon.
Makes me grateful to be invisible.
No, Mamet is a scary person. All of his non-fiction is deeply disturbing.