New this week is D.T. Max’s biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, which we excerpted last week. Also out are The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison and Every Day by David Levithan.
Tuesday New Release Day: Max, Evison, Levithan
“Medvedev is Russia’s first genuinely post-Soviet writer”
n+1 posted the introduction Keith Gessen wrote for Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good poetry and essay collection, which Gessen translated along with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill, and Bela Shayevich.
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Since You Asked
Recommended Reading: On terrible writing advice from famous writers.
Spooky, Scary
In the spirit of Halloween, Ploughshares has some literary costume ideas.
The Texas of Africa
“Nigeria did fracture once, however, and it is this story that Chinua Achebe, a giant of African letters, tells. His memoir of the moment describes when the country, yoked together artificially by British colonizers, split apart at a cost of more than a million lives.” The New York Times Book Review on the writer’s There Was A Country.
End of an Era
The final installment of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, The Story of the Lost Child, hits shelves next week. Emma Adler at Electric Literature has compiled a helpful Ferrante Study Guide if you’re feeling a bit lost. Cora Currier’s Millions essay on “reading Italy” through Elena Ferrante’s body of work is an ideal complementary read.
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Emily St. John Mandel Sees Other People
Our own Emily St. John Mandel, whose novel The Lola Quartet not only released this month but also made Maud Newton’s travel list (so you know it’s good!), sits down with Brad Listi for an Other People Podcast.
The Rebel Librarian
Before the regime change in Burma, Ye Htet Oo ran a secret library even though he risked facing “three months in jail for every book he lent without permission from the censorship board.”
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