Year in Reading alum Victor LaValle’s just-released novel The Devil in Silver was shouted out in our first Great 2012 Book Preview, and Nathan Huffstutter says it’s “exceptional.”
Victor LaValle’s Exceptional Latest
“A blood-sworn fan”
“So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it’s more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me.” Talking with Karen Russell.
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Next Top Novelist
Imagine a reality television show that pits up-and-coming writers against each other in a series of challenges designed to test their skills and endurance. When the smoke clears, and the bourbon’s gone, one talented writer will be reborn into gritty glory; only one writer will become America’s Next Top Writer!
Big Budget Brontë Biopic in the Works
All three Brontë sisters – Charlotte, Emily, and Anne – will be the subject of a new “blockbuster biopic,” reports Telegraph & Argus. An announcement about the cast and crew will be made on April 21, 2016 – the 200th anniversary of Charlotte’s birth date – but early speculation indicates that Harry Potter star Rupert Grint may play Branwell.
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It Keeps Giving
“Still, it’s difficult to know whether [Shel] Silverstein, who died of a heart attack in 1999, after keeping out of the public eye for more than two decades, meant for us to read the book so conclusively. His biography and body of work suggest a subtler, and, in the end, perhaps an even more troubling, way of looking at it.” Ruth Margalit on The Giving Tree.
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The Baroque Era
“These poets foreground elaborate and mythically transgressive evocations of eros in which stylistic excesses counter the violent excesses of homophobia and racial marginalization. The queer Baroque is, fundamentally, a poetry of radical ambivalence.” On Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones.
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Home Is Where the Story Begins
“Is the reason to have a home, as the narrator in Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, asserts, ‘to keep certain people in and everyone else out’? Or does home, as the narrator in William Maxwell’s autobiographical novel So Long, See You Tomorrow suggests, work primarily as a scaffolding of known things — as a place to read, a place to stash the damp umbrella, a place to listen to the porch swing creak?” Beth Kephart on the literary significance of home.
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J.E. Fishman on The New York Times
On The Nervous Breakdown this week, J.E. Fishman considers the book review practices of The New York Times: “My view is very much eastern, very much old school, where a book review from the Times was the only sure sign that an author had arrived. But maybe it’s time to rethink that, and this rethinking has been long overdue.”
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Asian Female Characters in the 21st Century
Read this interview with Mary H.K. Choi where she discusses her novel, Emergency Contact, and how it offers a more modern (2010s) portrayal of Asian American mother-daughter relationships. “Choi’s novel blows up Asian female stereotypes and prods readers to question their own cultural biases about women of color. For instance: Not all Asian moms are like Lane Kim’s in “Gilmore Girls.” Not all of them own antique shops or dry cleaners, care singularly about grades and won’t let their baby tiger cubs date until they’ve finished graduate school.”