New this week are William Boyd’s Waiting for Sunrise and Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here. Readers can also now get their hands on the second two volumes in the racy, headline-making Fifty Shades trilogy.
Tuesday New Release Day: Boyd, Swift, Fifty Shades
Linguistics
Leave it to the Oxford English Dictionary folks to put a damper on the linsane amount of eponyms based on Jeremy Lin’s surname.
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Imagine Capitalism
We get it, you’re into finance — but what can you tell me about lit crit? This piece from The Atlantic purports to show how literary theory has its place in the world of finance: “The act of imagining the future in finance goes by other names—’vision’ and ‘invention’ are among the more respectable euphemisms—in order to disguise the presence of the non-rational in financial activity. But rarely do scholars explore the role of imagination in economic life systematically. In a realm dominated by economic and financial scholarship that aspires to be ‘scientific,’ fantasy and creativity in envisioning the future are often ignored; they don’t fit well into a model of research whose aim is to reduce unknowns and to eliminate surprises as much as possible.”
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People Truly Engaged in Life Have Messy Houses
The Guardian interviews Year in Reading alumna Ottessa Moshfegh about her writing life, noir fiction, and her novel Eileen. As she puts it, “I’m interested in taking establishment genre and turning it on its head. I didn’t really set out to write a noir novel and I don’t know if I exactly have.”
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The End of Beauty
Recommended Reading: This essay on Jorie Graham, Modernist poetry, and the resistance of closure from The Nation. In the essay, Ange Mlinko puts Graham in league with such writers as John Ashbery and Frederick Seidel as some of the few living American poets “to have advanced a worldly, Modernist model of the poem into the 21st century.”
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On Literary Blogging
Book Snobbishness: “Using your personal taste or literary standards to dictate to other people what they should spend their time or money on. It’s not just about looking down on someone for reading romance or science fiction (though that’s part of it, of course), but also about shaming readers for where they spend money or the format in which they read.” Amanda Nelson, managing editor of Book Riot, sits down with 0s&1s to talk about gender, books and blogging. To get your fill of literary blogging, check out our list of must-read literary Tumblrs.
Agent of Chaos
Recommended Reading: Daniel Marc Janes on the fictional namesakes of London’s mayor.
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“Books are an existential crisis”
Kyle Winkler, in an editorial for Vouched Books (which I’ve mentioned previously), writes that “books are an existential crisis” because we can’t possibly read them all.
In Memoriam: Gordon Willis
Gordon Willis, the celebrated cinematographer who worked on The Godfather films and Annie Hall, passed away Sunday at the age of 82. The Paris Review has posted a short “In Memoriam,” which serves as both a wonderful introduction to the work of this artist and a knowing celebration of his work, complete with a video of Manhattan‘s bridge scene and an interview with Willis himself.
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