One Goodreads vigilante has created a master list of authors notorious for responding immaturely or meanly to negative reviews of their work. Elsewhere, iDreamBooks, a new Rotten Tomatoes-type service, was launched. The site aggregates critics’ book reviews and shows you what to read next.
Two Tools for your TBR Pile
Mirror Man
The "mirror man" makes a showing at LA's Griffith Observatory.
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.
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Gottlieb’s Letter
“A very proper letter (‘scrutinized and corrected by the magazine's fact checkers and proofreaders,’ wrote the Times) was sent to [Robert] Gottlieb, beseeching him to decline the [New Yorker] job,” writes Elon Green in his overview of Gottlieb’s brief stint as the magazine’s editor. How would you feel if Donald Barthelme, Deborah Eisenberg, Ian Frazier, Jamaica Kincaid, Janet Malcolm, J.D. Salinger, and 148 others all told you, “don’t come” to your new job?
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Down the Rabbit Hole
Recommended Reading: In her new memoir, Joyce Carol Oates praises Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass as “the singular book that changed my life – that made me yearn to be a writer.”
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