The field has been set for The Morning News‘ annual Tournament of Books. Who will emerge victorious this year? Will it be a DeWitt or a deWitt?
The Tournament of Books
Phonies
The case against The Catcher in the Rye. But what will all of the hip high school teachers assign now? (Our own Garth Risk Hallberg disagrees.)
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Nothing Made Up
Sit down with Jessa Crispin, literary blogger and author, at The Rumpus.
Anna Quindlen on Harper Lee
Anna Quindlen at The Huffington Post is one of the many writers reflecting on the greatness of To Kill A Mockingbird in honor of the book's 50th anniversary.
Uprooted
What is deracination, and why is it key to understanding American fiction? In her novel Housekeeping, Pulitzer laureate Marilynne Robinson defines it as “the free appreciation of whatever comes under one’s eye,” inspired by the Western sentiment of “feeling no tie of particularity to any single past or history.” In the Boston Review, Jess Row states that deracination is “a long-lived and nearly universal trope in white American literature,” claiming it represents “an American ideal: not to strip from the roots, but to de-race oneself.”
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Reread Nation
Why do we reread novels obsessively as children but hardly ever as adults? At The Morning News, Clay Risen discusses why rereading appeals to children so much. "It was a residual sense of wonder, left over long after I had accepted that the reality on the page and the reality beyond it are distinct." Pair with: Our essay on the pleasures and perils of rereading.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Jin; Saizarbitoria; Jackson; Carson; Conroy; Boyle
Out this week: The Boat Rocker by Ha Jin; Martutene by Ramón Saizarbitoria; Black Elk by Joe Jackson; Float by Anne Carson; A Lowcountry Heart by Pat Conroy; and The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
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Vera, or Verdure
Over the course of a half-century, Vladimir Nabokov wrote hundreds of letters to his wife Vera, which are being published in book form this week for the first time. Among other things, they reveal the absurd pet names he invented for her (such as Goosykins and Monkeykins) and display Nabokov musing over whether or not to borrow a friend’s castle for the summer. Also worth reading: our own Garth Risk Hallberg on Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor.
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Advice From The Hoary
“Me? He wants me to give him advice? But why? I still have no idea what I am doing. Then I realized that I did, at least, have eight more years of a writing practice that had run in tandem with a life of odd jobs, graduate school, starting a business, traveling, etc. I thought about an anecdote my friend Daniel once told me about what happened when Ian McEwan was asked to give advice to a young writer just starting out. He simply said, ‘Be successful.’” Catherine Lacey gives advice to a not-much-younger writer.
I’ve only read three of the books (so far), but I *loved* The Sisters Brothers. So I think I’m going with deWitt on this one!