LA Times Lays Off Reviewers

“What does it mean to be rich in a poor country? Or to possess power that you don’t want? Why have the ‘educated classes’ in India and Pakistan abdicated their social responsibilities?” Parul Sehgal reviews Aatish Taseer’s Noon for The New York Times.

What if H.P. Lovecraft’s work were set in Hollywood instead of New England? At The Toast, Kevin Sharp writes Lovecraftian gossip columns. “Two very famous couples, both well known for their complicated personal lives and grand professional successes (less known, perhaps, for the horrid dark secrets that throb and scream in their antediluvian Hollywood mansions), met for a fateful dinner.”

Electric Literature’s blog The Outlet begins a series of essays with the question: “Is Zadie Smith the Barack Obama of literature?”

Our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire is almost here. While we wait, read Boris Kachka’s profile of Hallberg for Vulture, about the expectation surrounding his highly anticipated 944-page debut novel and the experience of writing a book that is “unpublishably long.” We’ll be publishing our own illuminating interview with Hallberg on Monday.

Just about every review of Virginia Zaharieva’s Nine Rabbits calls attention to its “narrative virtuosity” and the way it “packs several genres into one.” That might sound like empty praise until you check out this excerpt for yourself, and see that the book is not only a memoir, and a coming-of-age story, but it’s also a cookbook.