David Ulin offers a brief consideration of Stephen King. King’s work, Ulin writes, “exposes, with real acuity, a lot about who we are.”
Ulin on King
Makes Excel Seem Like a Breeze
Hate your job? At least you’ve never been Stanley Kubrick’s secretary: “Instead of having [‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’] typed on only the few sheets seen by viewers, the director asked his secretary Margaret Warrington to type it on each one of the 500-odd sheets in the stack. What’s more, he also had Warrington type up an equivalent number of manuscript pages in four languages—French, German, Italian, Spanish—for foreign releases of [The Shining].”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Strout, Lytal
A pair of books featured in our Great 2013 Book Preview hit shelves today: Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout’s fourth novel, The Burgess Boys, as well as Benjamin Lytal’s A Map of Tulsa.
Against Captain Underpants
Renaissance Learning has released its annual report on what children are reading. The NYDaily News books blog takes offense at some of the more popular books named in the report, suggesting that kids and teens deserve to be challenged by better literature. The Huffington Post mines through the report to discover that American teenagers on average are still reading at or near the level of fifth graders.
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The Complete Spy Magazine, Now Online
Like a time machine to the first Bush Administration, the complete archives of the late, lamented, and hugely influential Spy Magazine are now apparently available through Google Books (via). We’d offer a few keywords to get you started, but the riches are too many. Okay, fine. You twisted our collective arm. Ivana Trump. Henry Kissinger. O.J. Celebrity Pro-Am Ironman Nightlife Decathalon. Go nuts.
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The Art of Fiction with Imre Kertész
The Paris Review’s interview with Hungarian author (and recent retiree) Imre Kertész is up on their website now, and to celebrate the occasion the magazine is offering a $10 discount on subscriptions. The promo code is good all week long.