When our own Mark O’Connell reviewed Edouard Levé’s Autoportrait, he wrote that the book compels you to keep reading because “the more Levé says, the more facts he sets down, the more you realize he hasn’t said.” But what if at the end, you’re meant to reread the book, too? Over at Words Without Borders, Jan Steyn says “the only way to get a better idea of how [these sentences] fit together is to keep reading, and reading, until the end, and then perhaps to read the book again.”
On Reading and Re-Reading Autoportrait
Bowie is Among Us
Graywolf Press’s Poem of the Week is “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?” by David Bowie-fan Tracy K. Smith. She writes, “Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep / Or charging through his veins.” Pair with Sophia Nguyen’s Millions review of Smith’s new memoir, Ordinary Light.
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The Fitzgeralds in Comic Form
This is the best comic about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald you’ll read all day, I promise.
Tuesday New Release Day: Bender, Marias, Sayrafiezadeh
Out this week: The Color Master, a new short story collection by Aimee Bender; an English-language translation of The Infatuations by Javier Marias; and Brief Encounters with the Enemy, the new Saïd Sayrafiezadeh book that Scott Cheshire reviewed for us on Monday. Read more about these and other releases in our Great 2013 Second-Half Book Preview.
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Den Father
By now the overlap between writers and drug addicts is pretty well-known, but it wasn’t so well-known back when Thomas De Quincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater. In the essay, De Quincey admitted that not only was he addicted to opium, he suspected he’d ingested more of the substance than any other man save Coleridge. (Incidentally, we reviewed a novel by Year in Reading alumnus Jeet Thayil that largely took place in an opium den.)
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The Winds of Winter
Recommended Reading: Lit Hub has been sharing excerpts of winter favorites, from James Joyce’s “The Dead” to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
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New McEwan on the Way
Here’s another book that will be in our July “Most Anticipated Books” round up: Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan, said to be set in 1972 and follow a female spy who is a compulsive reader of novels.
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