Rachel Rosenfelt, Editor in Chief of The New Inquiry, gets interviewed by Evan Kindley, Managing Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. In their conversation, Rosenfelt reveals that TNI‘s prevailing editorial principle is: “Is this boring? Is this safe? If the answer is yes, then it’s not for us.”
LARB talks TNI
Hold On
Lindsay King-Miller — she of Ask A Queer Chick — pays tribute to an old friend who died before her twenty-sixth birthday.
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Out West
“At the outset, Nair is in Sierra Leone to keep tabs on his old friend and uses the occasion to practice a little freelance extortion, stealing unspecified multinational secrets on a flash drive and sending them back to his girlfriend in Amsterdam. The first 50 pages are like a Johnsonian take on Graham Greene’s humid morality-play potboilers. Nair keeps meeting shifty European acquaintances and distrusting everything they say.” John Lingan reviews Denis Johnson’s new novel.
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Jumping Ship
How do you explain the recent “shit storm” at Granta? Let Full-Stop EIC Alex Shephard do it for you.
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Bookstore MFA
“There’s something about shopping for books where you’re open for anything. You’re faced with a wall of books, and you don’t know anything about most of them. At some point, it’s just you and the poems.” Carl Adamshick talks with the Los Angeles Review of Books about Powell’s and the “bookstore MFA.” Pair with our own Janet Potter‘s essay on loving bookshops.
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Quick Links
A teacher’s charming poem in which he winds the imaginative grammar and spelling of his students into a feast of clever words. (via)A cornucopia of palindromes. “Rot can rob a born actor” and many, many more. And don’t miss the Palindrome Drama at the end of the page.Stephen Schenkenberg looks at how people find his blog… “how+do+you+construct+buried+alive+escape+tunnel” ???The 13-number ISBN is the book industry’s Y2K. For more details, see my post from 2004.Ed plumbs bad Amazon reviews, a never-ending ending font of humor.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Shafrir; VanderMeer; Tanizaki; Cameron; Strout
Out this week: Startup by Doree Shafrir; Borne by Jeff VanderMeer; The Maids by Junichiro Tanizaki; The Last Neanderthal by our own Claire Cameron; and Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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