Well, there goes your Sunday. The London Review of Books has uploaded a whole batch of podcasts to iTunes. And they’re free!
iLRB
Folk Lore
If his new novel Against the Country is any indication, Ben Metcalf gets his best inspiration from the worst of rural America. In the book, which features a panoply of awful crimes and obscenities, Metcalf rides roughshod over the notion of the rural idyll. In Bookforum, onetime Millions staffer Emily Colette Wilkinson reviews the novel, calling it “a gut-busting knee slapper” in spite of its glut of macabre scenes.
●
●
Jon-Jon Goulian gets another profile
For The Rumpus, Sari Botton interviews Jon-Jon Goulian to supplement his recent profile in The New York Times.
●
●
Back Home
Sometimes, a writer needs to live in the setting of his or her fiction, as was the case with William Faulkner, who famously took a train from Hollywood to Mississippi solely to break through his writer's block. Other times, they need to move away to find the inspiration to write about their home. In The Globe and Mail, Marsha Lederman writes about Emma Hooper, who credits her move to England with helping her write a novel set in her native Saskatchewan.
Could That Be Kafka?
"What a horrible silent noisy people they are ... My feeling toward those mice is flat-out fear. It has to do with the unexpected, unbidden, unavoidable, virtually silent, persistent, ulteriorly motivated appearance of these animals.” It looks like Franz Kafka really didn't like mice. Reiner Stach, author of the definitive two-part biography of Kafka (The Decisive Years and The Years of Insight) has released a new book of Kafka ephemera called Is That Kafka? 99 Finds full of fascinating facts that never found a place in the biographies at large. This Millions review of Stach's biographies might also suit your Kafka fancy.
●
●
New Hosseini Novel
Khaled Hosseini, author of both The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has a new book coming out next May. And the Mountains Echoed will be “a multigenerational novel revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers”
●
●
Roughing It
Coming this fall: a newly published autobiography that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote before she decided to retool her life story into the Little House on the Prairie books. Originally intended for an adult audience, Pioneer Girl gives a decidedly unsanitized account of Ingalls Wilder’s life, including love triangles, deadbeat fathers and episodes of drunken abuse. In The Telegraph, Rosa Prince compiles a preview of the new book.