Sheila Heti interviews astrologer Jonathan Cainer about his craft. He tells her, among other things: “So I can’t honestly say I have an intellectual understanding about how time works. I have a faith in how it works.”
I have a faith in how it works.
Bethanne Patrick’s Bottom 10 of 2009
Book Studio's Bethanne Patrick's Top 10 and, perhaps more interestingly, Bottom 10 Books of the Year. Patrick minces no words on Lethem, Kingsolver, Niffenegger, Moore, and Larsson.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Fallon, Brown, Sriracha
New this week is a debut collection of loosely linked stories that's been getting some attention. Military families are the common theme in Siobhan Fallon's You Know When the Men Are Gone. Another newly released debut is Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters about a Shakespeare scholar's three daughters, all named after characters from the Bard's plays. Also new this week, a tome dedicated to the "hot" condiment of the moment, The Sriracha Cookbook.
Finnegans Draft
Ordinarily I would caution against reading a novel’s first draft, however in the case of Finnegans Wake, perhaps all rules should be tossed out the window. With this one, it seems as though any and all supplemental material might help unlock the finished product’s mysteries. Case in point: the entire first draft of Joyce’s most perplexing novel. (Of course, when all else fails, there’s always Michael Chabon to save the day.)
Another Under-40 on “20 Under 40”
Hitherto a Benedictine of the affectless, Tao Lin offers an appealingly unhinged take on The New Yorker's "20 Under 40 List" at Canteen.
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Language, the Savior
At The Guardian, Jhumpa Lahiri recounts the path that led her to write her latest book in Italian, one of the most anticipated books of 2016. As she puts it, “A week after arriving [in Rome], I open my diary to describe our misadventures and I do something strange, unexpected. I write my diary in Italian. I do it almost automatically, spontaneously. I do it because when I take the pen in my hand I no longer hear English in my brain. During this period when everything confuses me, everything unsettles me, I change the language I write in.”
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Yupper Class
The release date for Thomas Pynchon’s new novel is three weeks away, and to mark the occasion, Boris Kachka runs through a quick biography of the perpetually mysterious author. Among other things, Kachka points out that Pynchon resides in a fairly odd neighborhood for a recluse to choose to live in -- the Upper West Side. (Previously: "Thomas Pynchon to Publish New Novel" and "New Thomas Pynchon Teaser.")