The Quarterly Conversation is kicking off its new “Long Essays” e-book series with Lady Chatterley’s Brother: Why Nicholson Baker Can’t Write About Sex, and Why Javier Marias Can.
TQC Launches E-Book Series
This is your brain on metaphor
Annie Murphy Paul looks to neuroscience to understand the pleasure of the written word.
The Man Was Hard on Himself
Hot on the heels of The New Yorker, The Paris Review is excerpting Calvino’s letters. In Monday’s entry, POSTERITY IS STUPID, the author writes the following: “Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious and at the slightest flattery I immediately start to strut like a turkey.”
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Quarantined with Mrs. Dalloway
If you find yourself rereading Mrs. Dalloway while in lockdown, you're not alone. Evan Kindley examines why the novel is a balm for anxious readers.
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Embracing the Mysteries in Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby Books
Adrienne Raphel looks back at Beverly Cleary's beloved Ramona Quimby series, and notes that the books are riddled with odd discrepancies that are both puzzling and charming.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Rakow; Hauser; Le Guin
Out this week: This Is Why I Came by Mary Rakow; The Baker’s Tale by Thomas Hauser; and Late In the Day, a new collection of poems by Ursula K. LeGuin. For more on these and other recent titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
There Is No Real Life
If you enjoyed Bill Morris’s review of The Book of My Lives, Aleksandar Hemon’s latest collection of essays, then you’ll really like this interview with Hemon over at Guernica.
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The Remains of the Screen
“Any reasonably skilled novelist can evoke on the page the texture of memory, drawing the reader into the half-remembered, the blurred edges, the nervous nostalgia, the meandering associations across time and geography. In contrast, flashbacks on screen tend always to be clumsy beasts, announcing their arrival with unwanted fanfare and knocked-over furniture. Why is this?” Kazuo Ishiguro on film, and other novelists’ second-favorite art forms.
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Matthew Salesses Interviewed
Get to know Matthew Salesses, whose story “High Schools, or How to Be Asian American” we shouted out a few months back.