Our own Mark O’Connell has an excellent piece over on The New Yorker‘s books blog detailing his propensity to abandon burritos books, even good ones, halfway through.
Finish that book. Finish that burrito.
Literature from the Forever Wars
"All war literature, across the centuries, bears witness to certain eternal truths: the death and chaos encountered, minute by minute; the bonds of love and loyalty among soldiers; the bad dreams and worse anxieties that afflict many of those lucky enough to return home." In an omnibus review for The New York Times Michiko Kakutani looks at the fiction and journalism being written about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including recent Year in Reading alum and National Book Award winner Phil Klay's Redeployment and Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War, "the one book that most fluently and kaleidoscopically captures both the micro and the macro of Iraq." She also wonders, and attempts to explain, "why has there been no big, symphonic Iraq or Afghanistan novel?"
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Collapsing Genre
"The clash of genre values is fundamental to the novelistic experience. That’s how we ought to be thinking about our books. Instead of asking whether a comic book could be “as valuable” as King Lear, we ought to ask how the values of tragedy and romance might collide." Joshua Rothman writes about the coming "collapse of the genre system" and our own Emily St. John Mandel's National Book Award short-listed Station Eleven for The New Yorker.
Belle Epoque
In the annals of Southern literature, Elizabeth Spencer isn’t as well-known as Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, but she is, Wilton Barnhardt writes, “one of America’s best short-story writers.” The 92-year-old author’s new collection marks “65 years and counting of superb writing,” he argues.
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Whodunnit
And then there was you: the Oxford English Dictionary is soliciting public help in tracking down "a mysterious, possibly pornographic, 19th-century book from which a number of its quotations are derived."
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