Millions contributor Jacob Mikanowski takes a gander at Geoff Dyer’s Zona, and he invoked both Wittgenstein and Bolaño by the third paragraph of his write-up, so you know things are about to get heady.
“Geoff Dyer saw Stalker thirty years ago and hasn’t stopped returning to it.”
England’s Green and Pleasant Land
William Blake may have described its "green and pleasant land" but this week England had traded green for white, as you can see in this NASA photograph (c/o Gizmodo).
Reading Roxane Gay
It’s not often that a writer has an essay collection and a debut novel come out in the space of a few months, but that’s exactly the situation of Year in Reading alum Roxane Gay, whose novel An Untamed State and collection Bad Feminist are both getting published this year. At Bookforum, Margaret Weppler reads An Untamed State, which displays, she writes, “a staggering sense of strength, confidence and integrity."
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Really Old Lake, Even Older Forest
Which discovery is cooler? Russian scientists unearthing a 20-million-year-old lake beneath Antarctica, or Chinese scientists unearthing a 300-million-year-old forest beneath a coal mine?
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Clickity Clack
Where did Modernism come from? Did it spring from the alienation engendered by the nineteenth century? Or did it spring instead from -- as Hannah Sullivan argues in her new book, The Work of Revision -- the typewriter?
“The equal of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev”
Recommended Reading: Eileen Battersby on a new translation of the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov.
Google Books: Embargo Breaker
At The Washington Post, Craig Fehrman points out that FSG inadvertently broke its own embargo on Jimmy Carter's White House Diary when a preview of the book showed up on Google Books.
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Don’t Be Her
Want to be a female travel writer? That's great, says Jessa Crispin, just please don't be Elizabeth Gilbert.
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