A decade in the making, Val Kilmer’s one-man play about Mark Twain, Citizen Twain, will finally open this weekend. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with the actor (at a cemetery?) to talk about “his career and the landscape of America.”
That Title Alone Deserves A Groan
Newly Found Old Book
A 4,000-year-old manuscript has been found in Egypt, predating the “Book of the Dead.” Covered with colorful drawings and illustrations, the manuscript depicts divine beings and spells from incantations.
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Maureen Corrigan on Lacuna
NPR’s Maureen Corrigan applauds Barbara Kingsolver‘s Lacuna for “single-handedly keeping consumer zest alive for the literary novel,” as “the only literary novel caught in the cross hairs” of the price wars waged by Wal-mart, Amazon, and Target against booksellers (the others being genre novels). As for the book itself: “I wish I could say she also deserves kudos for writing a spectacular work of fiction…”
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A Radical Vision
Recommended reading: this brilliant and thorough profile of Toni Morrison from the New York Times Magazine, complete with a video of Morrison reading from her upcoming novel, God Help the Child.
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Sonya Chung at Sweet: Actors Reading Writers
My inner dramatist will have a debut outing at Sweet: Actors Reading Writers, Thurs. 12/2 at 7:30 pm, Three of Cups (First Ave at 5th Street, NYC). Actor Tonya Edmonds will perform an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Sebastian & Frederick. Other featured writers: Ed Park, Amanda Filipacchi, Jonathan Dixon, Maya Pindyck.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Pollan, Sedaris, Stelter, Currey, Thompson, Stothard, Rutherfurd, Wecker, Riley
The headliners this week are on the non-fiction side: Michael Pollan’s Cooked and Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris. Also new in non-fiction: Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV by the Times’ Brian Stelter and Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey. In fiction: The Humanity Project by Jean Thompson, The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard, Paris by Edward Rutherfurd, The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker, and The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope by Rhonda Riley.
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Update on Timbuktu’s West African Relics
Many feared the permanent loss of thousands of precious manuscripts and relics after insurgents razed Timbuktu’s Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research. The Institute was home to over 30,000 manuscripts dating back to the 13th century. Or was it? In a fascinating report, Rukmini Callimachi details the extraordinary efforts of the some passionate locals that wound up saving much of the collection.
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Books for the Trump Era
“[T]hat might be what liberal readers needs right now: Not just portraits of the Brexit and Trump-voting domestic Other, but a clearer sense of their own worldview’s limits, blind spots, blunders and internal contradictions.” The New York Times‘s Ross Douthat assembles a “Books for the Trump Era” reading list, including Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Christopher Lasch‘s The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, and Samuel P. Huntington‘s Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity. You can also read our own review of Houellebecq’s latest here.