To kick off German Literature Month, Melville House’s marketing manager picked the best beers to drink as you read Heinrich Böll. Now Dogfish Head’s brewmaster Sam Calagione has paired beers with a few other literary classics.
Book & Beer
August Open Letters
The August issue of Open Letters is available. Nestled amidst the literary fare are early Oscar nominations from Sarah Hudson and a piece on the video game The Sims by Phillip A. Lobo.
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A Necessary Delirium
“A dark and insane fantasy about the players large and small who populated our post-9/11 landscape, it’s not just the book we’ve maybe wanted but possibly the book we’ve needed — a strange lens to help us understand who we were, what we’ve done and who we may yet become.” Nathan Deuel reviews Mark Doten‘s The Infernal (which Adam Fleming Petty reviewed for the Millions here) for the LA Times.
First Murakami Collection in Almost A Decade
Haruki Murakami will publish his first short story collection in nine years this spring. Men Without Women will feature five previously published stories (including the controversial “Drive My Car”) and one new story. The book comes out in Japan in April, but there is no word on when we’ll see an English translation.
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Winter Reads: The Little House Books
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books bring an icy take on America in winter. To Guardian reader Alison Gibbsme, “as a child, they were full of adventure and excitement; as an adult I am shocked at how full of danger they are.”
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The Best of the Internet
The Bygone Bureau asked a whole heap of people to write for their annual “Best of the Internet” post, and I was one of them. Come on over to see what I have to say about Ted Berrigan, a Twitter robot, and a certain type of found poetry.
Primary Colors for the Age of Obama
Anonymous strikes again: On January 25th, the entity that brought us 1996’s deliciously scandalous Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics, offers a roman à clef for the Obama age: O: A Presidential Novel. Then it was Joe Klein, but this Anon. is still Anon. Perhaps better than the insider gossip: The media-fueled whodunit the novel’s sure to inspire.
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A Look at the Guantánamo Prison Library
New York Times reporter Charlie Savage set up a Tumblr dedicated to cataloging some of the books available in the Guantánamo prison library for detainees.
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Sell! Sell! Sell! (And Write, Too!)
Moleskine, the company responsible for the iconic writing pads favored by Ernest Hemingway and Vincent Van Gogh, is planning to launch a public stock offering next September.