China Miéville recorded a podcast with Lapham’s Quarterly editor Aidan Flax-Clark.
Miéville in Conversation
Travelogue
Recommended: Year in Reading alumna Sheila Heti on her time at the Cuirt Literary Festival.
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Preview of It Chooses You
To celebrate the printing of Miranda July’s It Chooses You in paperback McSweeney’s is offering a free excerpt from the book. Also see our brief review of It Chooses You and the excellent Onion article wondering what July’s whole “thing” is, anyways.
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Get Your First Edition Fix
Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore just launched a First Editions Club where members get a signed first edition of a new book each month. Some recent selections include: George Saunders’s Tenth of December (our review), Jonathan Dee’s A Thousand Pardons (our review), and Philipp Meyer’s The Son.
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Are You Going to Become an Old Man Here?
We’ve all read some version of this story before. In the newest iteration of Listicles for People Just Like You over at McSweeney’s, Rufi Thrope helpfully provides Ten Signs Your Name is James and You Are Teaching English at a Fancy Boarding School.
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Librarians on the Front Lines
“There are times it’s happening multiple times a day. Not too long ago, we had two in the same restroom at the same time. We call security, security calls paramedics. Of course they always find somebody lying there.” Samantha Sanders writes for Catapult about the epidemic of opioid overdoses in public libraries, and what some librarians are doing to respond. And ICYMI, here is Corinne Purtill in our own pages about British libraries under austerity cuts.
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“Which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism”
Much fuss was made about Barack Obama’s ex-girlfriends this week, as an excerpt from David Maraniss’ forthcoming Barack Obama: The Story was published in Vanity Fair. Of course, we sophisticated book readers care less about the man’s old flames than we do his literary pursuits, right? That’s why Mr. President’s analysis of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland” is so interesting.
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Across This Land
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova shares a series of drawings (produced in collaboration with Debbie Millman) that map the regions of the US according to literary quotations. Thoreau, perhaps not surprisingly, gets the East Coast with a quote from Walden, while Year in Reading alum Jeffrey Eugenides represents the Midwest.
The Problem with “Brave”
On odd reading habits, the problem with “brave” writing and being a writer in LA: an interview with Meghan Daum, whose essay collection The Unspeakable was reviewed by our own Hannah Gersen.
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