The NBCC finalists will be announced tonight at an event in New York City, and you’re invited! The event will feature drinks, hors d’ouevre, and (probably) a lot of reading glasses.
NBCC Finalist Party
Fighting for Space
Recommended Reading: London’s Feminist Library is at risk of being evicted. Broadly spoke to some of the women who are taking to the streets to save the space.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Bender, Marias, Sayrafiezadeh
Out this week: The Color Master, a new short story collection by Aimee Bender; an English-language translation of The Infatuations by Javier Marias; and Brief Encounters with the Enemy, the new Saïd Sayrafiezadeh book that Scott Cheshire reviewed for us on Monday. Read more about these and other releases in our Great 2013 Second-Half Book Preview.
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Meg Wolitzer Wonders
Recommended reading: Meg Wolitzer wonders “why are teenage girls drawn to books about mental instability?“
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Jaipur Literature Festival
Touted as Asia’s leading literature event, the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival is gearing up for it January 2010 program.
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“I can’t say that we responded with particular enthusiasm”
In 1998, not long after publishing his first novel, Dan Brown paid a visit to an English class at Phillips Exeter. Among the students in attendance that day was future New Yorker editor Joshua Rothman, whose fragmented recollection of Brown’s appearance turned into an instructive tale about “memory and its tricks.”
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“A Giant Empathy Machine”
“It may be true… that the internet will turn out to be ‘a giant empathy machine.’ And yet, as any reader knows, we’ve already had one for centuries.” Drew Calvert reviews The Novel: A Biography for the Los Angeles Review of Books and provides an argument for the novel in the digital age.
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“In matters like writing[…], a man does what he has to do—if he has to write, why then, he writes”
Rebecca Davis O’Brien unearths a letter in which Malcolm Cowley tackles the timeless question, “Should I get an MFA?” Just as poignant as Cowley’s letter is novelist Helen DeWitt’s pointed dismissal of Cowley’s advice in the comments section.