Here’s a double shot of Recommended Reading courtesy of Granta: Open City author Teju Cole on going blind, and Book of Clouds author Chloe Aridjis on Soviet-era cosmonauts.
Double Shot of Granta
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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A Matter of Time
Does literature have to be timeless? Over at Electric Literature, Kevin Pickard debates pop culture references in novels. Pair with Bill Morris’s Millions essay on books about the near future.
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2016 Guggenheim Fellows Announced
Earlier today, the Guggenheim Foundation announced this year’s Fellows, and the names on their list include a few that Millions readers will recognize. On the fiction side, there’s contributor Laila Lalami along with Year in Reading alumni Jess Row and Jesse Ball, while in nonfiction and poetry, there’s Amanda Petrusich along with Adam Kirsch, Chris Kraus and Deborah Landau. The winners each receive a sizeable cash grant.
The Intellectuals
A look at the writer Nelson Algren, a.k.a. Lewis Brogan in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins.
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Appearing Elsewhere
The spiffy new Los Angeles Review of Books website has posted my review of Ben Fountain’s new novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.
“Unfilmable” Novel to be Filmed
Salman Rushdie’s “unfilmable” novel Midnight’s Children, winner of the “Booker of Bookers,” is apparently coming to the big screen.