Saul Bellow on being Jewish in America, and Lorin Stein, in an interview, discusses contemporary Jewish writers.
Jewish America
Best American Books On Sale
Pretty good deal on Amazon today: All the e-book versions of the “Best American” books are $1.99.
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Tuesday New Releases: Russell, Brockmeier, Hale, and More
New this week are Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer by Wesley Stace (the pen name of singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding), and buzzed about debut The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale. On the nonfiction side is a new biography, Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall. And new in paperback is Millions Hall of Famer The Big Short by Michael Lewis.
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Twin Peaks literary criticism
With the end of the “Golden Age of TV,” let’s turn back to the show that started it all: Twin Peaks, “a revelation and inspiration for countless writers coming of age in the early 90s.” The new Twin Peaks Project begins with this nostalgic article in The Believer.
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Dwight Garner on Commonplace Books
Do you jot down thought-provoking lines from books, shows, songs, and movies? Then you, too, keep a commonplace book.
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Characterizing Sleep
On this date 109 years ago, a cartoonist first paired the letter “Z” to the act of sleeping, beating out other attempts to write out the sound of slumber such as the tenacious “g-r-r-k-k-k-k” and the elegant “z-z-z-c-r-r-k-k-k-k.”
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Change
The New York Review of Books excerpts recent Nobel winner Mo Yan’s part fiction, part memoir Change.
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