A great profile of Adam Gopnik and his work as an essayist in the Ryerson Review of Journalism.
The ‘I’ has to become ‘you.’
“Degreelash”
What did we read in the Obama era? Christian Lorentzen has some answers. Apart from individual books like The Flamethrowers and The Art of Fielding, he comes up with some genres that have dominated the past eight years, including autofiction, works of trauma and fables of meritocracy. (You can probably guess where Leaving the Atocha Station ends up.)
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Working Against the Narrative
“If I was working against any existing Detroit narrative, it is the one where working-class black people exist as numbers or victims and not as fully-realized, complex people.” Angela Flournoy on her most recent work, The Turner House, a National Book Award finalist. We interviewed the author and reviewed the book.
He’s the Ragtime King / There is None Higher…
Ta-Nehisi Coates calls Doctorow sire (in his post E.L. Doctorow - Badass M.C.) Back in grad school, we just called him "The Funk Doc."
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Books, Charity, and Africa
The Hipster Book Club is doing a literary-themed charity drive for the famine in the Horn of Africa.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Fallon, Brown, Sriracha
New this week is a debut collection of loosely linked stories that's been getting some attention. Military families are the common theme in Siobhan Fallon's You Know When the Men Are Gone. Another newly released debut is Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters about a Shakespeare scholar's three daughters, all named after characters from the Bard's plays. Also new this week, a tome dedicated to the "hot" condiment of the moment, The Sriracha Cookbook.