My favorite part of my apartment is my wall-length bookshelf. When I look at it, I think of all the time I spent reading and accumulating its contents. I feel I’ve earned it, which is why I’m slightly insulted by Juniper Books’ $3,000-$100,000 “collection-development service,” a program designed for “people who want a library but haven’t had the time or inclination to amass a collection of books.”
Ersatz Intellectualism
Russian Literary News
Russian literary news and awards -- i.e. winners and runners-up of Russia's Big Book Award -- at Lizok's Bookshelf.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Smiley; Wallace; Manzini; Meloy; Gizzi; Eliot; Knausgaard
Out this week: Ember Days by our own Nick Ripatrazone, Early Warning by Jane Smiley; Madam President by The View co-host Nicolle Wallace; Black Run by Antonio Manzini; Devotion by Maile Meloy; Collected Poems by Michael Gizzi; Volume 5 of The Letters of T.S. Eliot; and Book 4 of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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A Hideous Play
“Titus Andronicus is a hideous play…. In other words, it’s one of those tragedies that was just crying out for an illustrated edition.” View Leonard Baskin’s grotesque etchings of Titus Andronicus in The Paris Review.
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Tuesday New Release Day: DeLillo; Millet; Russo; Morgan; Haslett; Erens
New this week: Zero K by Don DeLillo; Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet; Everybody’s Fool by Richard Russo; The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan; Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett; and Eleven Hours by Pamela Erens (who we interviewed). For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
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“It’s why the gift horse is a gift”
Recommended Reading: “The Tiny Men in the Horse’s Mouth” by Matthew Olzmann for New England Review.
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“manuals for a thinking person”
Jed Perl on Susan Sontag's journals: "The fascination of Sontag’s prose—and its sadness—is in the extent to which she is describing herself as a person who can never really get beyond a schematic kind of thinking and feeling."
I’ll sell mine for 100,000
There is, of course, nothing new about this. The rich have always wanted to look educated. Don’t you remember this part from Gatsby?:
“The books?”
He nodded.
“Absolutely real–have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and– Here! Lemme show you.”
Taking our skepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”
“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too–didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”
http://books.google.com/books?id=EFi2RVvX3wsC&lpg=PT51&dq=Absolutely%20real–have%20pages%20and%20everything.&pg=PT51#v=onepage&q=Absolutely%20real–have%20pages%20and%20everything.&f=false
What a joke.
Yikes. I mean that’s absolutely awful but I definitely would not mind doing that for a living…