Melville House’s “Art of the Novella” series gets some major, major love from Joe Fassler in The Atlantic.
Not Quite a Novel, Not Quite a Tweet
The New VC
In Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour, a series of short stories take the reader from the present day to 2025, exploring a near-future Vancouver in which things grow steadily more surreal. As Emily Oppenheimer writes, it’s clearly a work of speculative fiction, yet the setting resembles our own world in uncanny ways. Sample quote: “Compton achieves the more troubling, yet ultimately more satisfying, goal of portraying the fantastical as something that is very much rooted in what we think we already know about ourselves and our world.”
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“The grand and minute violence of everyday life”
Recommended Reading: Seth Cosimini on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.
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The Ambitions of Oscar Wilde
“I won’t be a dried-up Oxford don, anyhow. I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.” –Oscar Wilde on rejecting a career as a classics scholar. (via Book Bench)
Interview with A.S. Byatt
Guardian posts an interesting video interview with A.S. Byatt about poetry, her novel The Children’s Book, and our persistent interest in ourselves.
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The New Western
“The presentation of himself as a damaged outsider, barely holding on, ups the dramatic ante, though it does seem at odds with the accomplished, balanced, commanding prose he appears able to muster with every sentence — not to mention his prestigious awards and teaching stints.” On Charles D’Ambrosio’s Loitering.