The New Yorker’s book blog continues to host “Questioningly,” a so-called Twitter game show. The most recent installment featured the imagined Facebook status updates of literary figures, and was hosted by Ben Greenman. Who, might I add, is on a roll these days over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency too.
Ben Greenman is on a roll
Ishiguro Interviewed
“Maybe in the future I’ll feel compelled to write that kind of specific and current book, but right now I feel that my strength as a fiction writer is my ability to take a step back. I prefer to create a more metaphorical story that people can apply to a variety of situations, personal and political.” Electric Literature interviews Kazuo Ishiguro about his most recent novel, The Buried Giant, which our own Lydia Kiesling reviewed here.
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Pitchfork and The Dissolve
Pitchfork Media announced last week that it will begin supplemented its popular music website with a new project dedicated to “reviews, commentary, interviews, and news about the films of the moment.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Atwood; Watkins; Walsh; Jollimore; Coetzee; Kurtz; Myles; Levi
New this week: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood; Gold, Fame, Citrus, by Claire Vaye Watkins; Vertigo by Joanna Walsh; Syllabus of Errors by Troy Jollimore; The Good Story by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz; I Must Be Living Twice by Eileen Myles; and The Complete Works of Primo Levi. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
“Scatter[ing] lightning and lawn debris across your psyche.”
The estimable New York Times Magazine profiled Patricia Lockwood this week, and in the process printed the phrase “tit-pics” for probably the first time in the Grey Lady’s history. Lockwood’s name should be no stranger to Millions readers, of course, as I’ve previously steered readers’ attention toward The Poet Laureate of Twitter’s works in the past (such as this one, and this one, and this one, too.) As a bonus, Dwight Garner reviewed her latest collection, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, for the paper as well.
The Twelfth What?
Who knew? Here’s a handy infographic from Electric Literature that highlights seventeen films you probably didn’t know were based off of books.
Where She Was From
For only $1.65 million, you can have a piece of Joan Didion’s childhood. Her high school home, The Didion House, is on the market in Sacramento. Before you make a bid, it might be good to brush up on California with Didion’s 2003 memoir, Where I Was From.
Strange and New
Last week, I pointed readers to an article about Michael Faber’s latest book and his decision to quit writing fiction. Now, in the Times Book Review, Marcel Theroux sizes up the novel, writing that “the reader is drawn through the book effortlessly, by the combination of incidental strangeness and the suspenseful handling of plot.”