Behold the Shakespearean insult generator, thou globe of sinful continents.
Thou thing of no bowels thou!
The New Kid
As of last night, the UK has a brand new literary prize, the Folio, which its founders describe as “a Booker without the bow ties.” The Independent chronicles the short history of the prize, which owes its existence to a controversy among Man Booker judges two years ago.
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Colson Whitehead’s Two Types of Books
“There’s only two kinds of books, shit you like, and shit you don’t like," Colson Whitehead told the crowd in his lively AWP Keynote.
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Draw a Novel
Recommended reading (and doodling): an excerpt from an upcoming translation of Martin Solares‘s How to Draw a Novel, complete with diagrams and squiggling lines. Pair with our own Hannah Gersen‘s look at authors’s methods for drawing and mapping their own novels-in-progress.
Laughing with Shakespeare
A Writer’s Job
Recommended Reading: Zoë Heller and Francine Prose discuss a writer’s moral obligation and responsibility to art.
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Fact-checking Steinbeck
As John Steinbeck’s classic Travels With Charley nears the half-century mark, a writer has retraced the author’s cross-country journey and come to the conclusion that the resulting book was full of inaccuracies and outright fabrications. The journalist Bill Steigerwald, whose article appears in the current issue of the libertarian quarterly Reason, says he didn’t set out to trash the Nobel laureate. “As a libertarian, I kind of liked the old guy,” Steigerwald tells the New York Times. “He liked guns; he liked property rights.”
New Hardcovers with Paul Ingram
Watch beloved bookseller at Iowa City’s Prairie Lights Paul Ingram talk about this season’s best hardcovers. I loved getting his recommendations in person, and this is almost–almost!–as good. (via.)
Foul Swine
Somehow we knew that Gary Shteyngart had a pretty interesting childhood. As Andy Borowitz explains in a review of Little Failure, the author’s new memoir, the elder Shteyngart regaled his son with “outlandish” stories, most notably “a sci-fi saga about a Jewish planet under constant attack by volleys of pork.” You can learn what the author likes to read today in his Year in Reading piece.
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