What do Talking Heads, The Smiths, Judas Priest, and Blondie have in common? They’re all featured in the playlist Picador made to accompany the paperback release of Jeffrey Eugenides’s latest novel, The Marriage Plot. The Spotify list is chock full of songs “Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell might have been listening to in the early 1980s.” You can read Eugenides’s take on the book’s genesis over here, too.
The Marriage Playlist
The Soviet Ghost
The Virginia Quarterly Review‘s Fall 2011 issue, “The Soviet Ghost“, is now available online. Not to be missed is Ed Ou’s heartbreaking essay and slideshow on how the Soviet government performed nuclear weapons tests on innocent Kazakh citizens. Dimiter Kenarov’s essay on Belarusian tractors is simultaneously a personal journey, an impressive work of history, and a good ol’ fashioned KGB crime story.
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The Real 24-Hour Bookstore
At one point, the only 24-hour bookstore was in Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, but Beijing has the first real 24-hour bookstore. The Sanlian Bookstore will be open around the clock for book lovers and insomniacs alike.
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“Deceptively spare”
“The art style also changes from chapter to chapter — some panels fill the pages to the edges and are overwhelming in their dark palette; some seem ordinary in proportion, confident; others fill the space around small figures with words, words, words; and others still have a minimalist, sketch-like quality and barely occupy the page at all — and they aren’t always chapters, or even stories, in the traditional sense.” On MariNaomi’s Dragon’s Breath and Other Stories.
“Free to make her a watery presence”
Recommended Reading: Jonathan Lee’s interview with Year in Reading favorite Rachel Kushner. The piece is a nice complement to our own interview with Kushner from last year.
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