Recommended Reading: Matthew Salesses’ new story in the latest Guernica, “High Schools, or How to Be Asian American.”
Some Wednesday Reading from Mr. Salesses
Weekend Links
George Saunders is the subject of one of Deborah Solomon’s wacky interviews in the New York Times. (via Ed)Scott gets a byline in the SF Chronicle for his review of Duchess of Nothing by Heather McGowan.Elizabeth Crane summarizes the Tom Cruise flick Minority Report like only she can.”A rare collection of Dracula-related books is to be handed over to Dublin City Library.” I had no idea Bram Stoker was Irish.
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Penkov Takes the BBC ISS Award
East of the West author Miroslav Penkov is sitting pretty these days. The Bulgarian fiction writer recently nabbed the BBC International Short Story Award for his collection’s titular story, “East of the West.” With a purse of £15,000, this is the world’s biggest prize for short stories, though typically it considers work by British authors only. However this year, due to the 2012 Olympics, the field was expanded to include international writers. All five judges unanimously picked Penkov’s work over the nine other submissions. You can read an excerpt online courtesy of Google Books, and you can get a little more acquainted with Penkov’s themes on Picador’s Tumblr.
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Atwood in the Twittersphere
I dare you not to be charmed by Margaret Atwood’s account of becoming a Twitter user. “Despite their sometimes strange appearances, I’m well pleased with my followers.” (via kottke)
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Stiff Manners
It takes a certain skill to link Taipei by Tao Lin, My Struggle Part I and Part II by Karl Ove Knausgaard and an old book on Italian painting in a single essay, but Zadie Smith is (naturally) the writer for the job. In a new piece for The NY Review of Books, she asks the reader to “imagine [a drawing of a corpse] represents an absolute certainty about you, namely, that you will one day be a corpse.”
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