Some exciting news for Don DeLillio fans. His first ever collection of short stories is coming out in November, The Angel Esmeralda. The stories were written between 1979 and 2011, and the title story appeared in Esquire in May 1994.
New DeLillo
Satire and Self-Laceration
At The Rumpus, a chat with the poet Randall Mann, whose new book, Straight Razor, came out last week. Among the more interesting tidbits revealed in the interview: Mann’s father was an Olympic silver medalist.
Library of Lagging
“‘There is almost no work, within the vast range of literature and science,’ [Thomas Jefferson] wrote in an 1874 report, ‘which may not at some time prove useful to the legislature of a great nation.’ Thus the Library Of Congress’s mandate expanded: it would acquire anything and everything of importance … By the late 19th century, the LOC had become a kind of national brain trust, a heritage of information that aspired to timelessness.” This piece on the Library of Congress and its internet progress (or lack thereof) is fascinating and thorough. Go and spend some time with the digital archive, there are only around seven million gigabytes of information for you to thumb through.
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Like Reading How-To Manuals
James Hynes discusses the books he read when writing his latest novel, Next: “I wanted to see if I could write a day-in-the-life novel, a narrative that would be set in a single day, or part of one, and by working backwards and forwards through flashbacks, encompass the entire life of a single character.”
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Carrots: Lies and Truth
When I was young, my mother always told me I should eat my carrots so my vision would improve. For twenty four years, I’ve obeyed. But now it seems I’ve been living a lie all this time. (Bonus carrot link: the most common type used to be purple, but orange was normalized to please the Dutch monarchy.)
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