Colson Whitehead’s zombie thriller Zone One hits shelves today, as does Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem. Also out is The Journals of Spalding Gray.
Tuesday New Release Day: Whitehead, Jin, Gray
Whiting Winners
Lots of excellence on the list of 2011 Whiting Award winners: Teddy Wayne, Daniel Orozco, Ryan Call, and more. If I were you, I’d celebrate the weekend by reading Orozco’s “Orientation.”
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A Reader’s Manifesto
This week in book-related comics: “A Reader’s Manifesto” by Grant Snider, via Electric Literature.
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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More like Readit, ha ha.
Since writing a plea for a YouTube lit category in Fiction Circus (which we discussed on our Tumblr), Miracle Jones has built a Reddit thread for literary videos.
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Red October
Haven’t heard of Teffi? You can blame that one on the Bolsheviks. The early-20th-century Russian poet, playwright and journalist, whose fans included (oddly enough) both Vladimir Lenin and Tsar Nikolai, had to flee a Moscow in turmoil to avoid persecution as a dissident. Now, several publishers are reprinting her memoir of exile, for which The New Statesman has details and a short biography.
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$pending the $tephen King Money
What do you do when Stephen King uses the same title on one of his books as you used on yours (which came out earlier)? You reap the rewards of mistaken Amazon purchases, and you document the spoils of those royalty checks.
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