Okay, so earlier this week I mentioned Emily Nussbaum‘s excellent profile of Lena Dunham for New York Magazine. Now Lorrie Moore‘s written one too, for The New Yorker blog. The short piece, as you might imagine, is a near perfect meeting of author and subject; who could be better at writing about Girls?
Even more Girls
Sentimental Education
Recommended Reading: On sentimentality in literary fiction and commercial novels.
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Online translations of Murakami’s short fiction
For those who can’t wait for Haruki Murakami‘s new novel, Will over at Wednesday Afternoon Picnic will be translating flash fiction from Murakami’s collection of short stories Kumozaru.
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A Few Chapters Short of a Novel
Do people enjoy writers like Pynchon and Nabokov in part because they’re so odd? A new paper suggests that we tend to like art when we believe its creator is eccentric. The Atlantic reads through a study that’s a bit of a strange one.
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Daenerys = Cleopatra?
This week in book-related infographics: a look at the real history behind Game of Thrones, from the Anglo-Saxon conflict to Cleopatra.
A Lust for Lists
“Why do we lust for lists?” Sandra M. Gilbert may not have an answer, but she does have a response to all those “100 Best American Novels” lists (and a list of her own). The Millions has a few lists too, of course – be sure to check out Janet Potter‘s “28 Books You Should Read If You Want To.”
The First Perec
On the rediscovery of Georges Perec‘s first novel, Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere, a book “connected by a hundred threads to every part of the literary universe that Perec went on to create—but not like anything else that he wrote,” from the New York Review of Books.