New this week is Carlos Fuentes’ vampire tale set in Mexico City, Vlad. Also out are The Collective by Don Lee, Tigers in Red Weather by Liza Klaussmann, Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer, and Evel Knievel Days by Pauls Toutonghi, who last year introduced us to six Egyptian writers as the world watched the Egyptian revolution.
Tuesday New Release Day: Fuentes, Lee, Klaussmann, Netzer, Toutonghi
“I see their politics as a response to a challenge they both face”
Page-Turner interviewed Dinaw Mengestu, who has a story in the latest issue of the New Yorker (paywall), and whose forthcoming book All Our Names was highlighted by yours truly in our Great Book Preview.
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Bound
“Think the kennel partner was a man? Think he was, in Braverman’s telling, threatened by her success? You are correct. There are so many stories like this, in Double Bind, of ambition built up and then put in its place: the high school classmate who sneered to Roxane Gay, when he learned that she’d been accepted to Yale when he had not, ‘affirmative action.'”
I will tell you this Rosalina, not as a taunt or a threat but as an evocation of joy.
From Werner Herzog’s letter to Rosalina, the woman he employs to keep his house: “Music is futile and malicious. So please, if you require entertainment while organizing the recycling, refrain from the ‘pop radio’ I was affronted by recently. May I recommend the recitation of some sharp verse. Perhaps by Goethe. Or Schiller. Or Shel Silverstein at a push.”
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For the Sake of Cohesion
“Setting is often the last piece of the jigsaw. I start somewhere else—with a kind of a premise, a set of relationships, a theme—and I often have a long period when I can’t figure out where the story should be put down. I find myself going location hunting. Not just for a time and place, but also for a genre, if you like.” Kazuo Ishiguro on the Hazlitt podcast. For more things Ishiguro, here is our own Lydia Kiesling’s review of Ishiguro’s latest novel, The Buried Giant.
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Congrats Lydia!
Congratulations to Millions contributor Lydia Kiesling whose thoughtful essay “Proust’s Arabesk: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk” was named a finalist for the 3quarksdaily Arts & Literature Prize. And thanks to all the Millions readers who voted for our essays in the first round of the contest.
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We’re Not In the Establishment. Right, Geoff?
In The Guardian, Geoff Dyer talks about about the literary establishment and how, in particular, “unspoken assumption that [it] – whatever it is – is a bad thing.”