New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean sits down with L.A. Times Jacket Copy to talk about her new book Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. Orlean also discusses her dogs and her family’s recent move to Los Angeles.
Susan Orlean in Los Angeles
Get out of the restaurant
Though excellent fiction has been staged in restaurants (Richard Russo's Empire Falls comes to mind, as well as YA novel Hope was Here), I have to admit Rebecca Makkai at Ploughshares has a point that dining-in-public scenes are getting a bit old. "All the unfolding of napkins and poking at the French fries... it's filler."
Hunger Games Madlibs
Happy Hunger Games! To celebrate the release of Catching Fire, read Ben Blatt's textual analysis of the most popular adverbs, adjectives, and sentences used by Suzanne Collins in The Hunger Games trilogy, Stephenie Meyer in Twilight, and J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series. Unsurprisingly, the most popular sentence in Twilight is, "I sighed." We're sighing, too. Pair with: Our essay on how teen fantasy heroines need to grow up.
Tuesday New Release Day: Gould; Foster; Netzer; Sohn; Rotert; Jacob; Canobbio; Wallace; Weil; Beckett
Out this week: Friendship by Emily Gould; God Is an Astronaut by Alyson Foster; How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky by Lydia Netzer; The Actress by Amy Sohn; Last Night at the Blue Angel by Rebecca Rotert; The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing by Mira Jacob; Three Light-Years by Andrea Canobbio; The Sacred River by Wendy Wallace; The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil; and a previously unpublished short story by Samuel Beckett.
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Indie Strong
"Like actual endangered species, independent bookshops induce a fiercely protective kind of love; paradoxically, it’s often their precarity that saves them." The Guardian profiles Philippe Ungar and Franck Bohbot, the men behind "We Are New York Indie Booksellers," which features the 50 remaining indies in and around Manhattan. (Pair with: Janet Potter's history of bookstore love).
A Method to the Madness
All the world is about to become a stage. The Globe Theatre will be performing Hamlet in every country on Earth starting on April 23, 2014, Shakespeare's 450th birthday. The 205-nation tour should take two years. This is one of many Shakespearean anniversary celebrations including contemporary authors covering his classics.