Hack author Dmitry Samarov is this week’s guest blogger at Writers No One Reads (which we’ve mentioned before). In his first post, Samarov takes a look at the work of Willard Motley, who grew up in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood in the early 1900s, and is most well-known for his 1947 bestseller, Knock On Any Door.
Dmitry Samarov on Writers No One Reads
Tuesday New Rease Day: Nesbø, Tillman
Jo Nesbø has a new noir from the North this week, The Leopard. Also out: Richard Nash's Red Lemonade continues to re-release the backlist of Millions favorite Lynne Tillman; this week it's Motion Sickness and No Lease on Life.
Ways of Seeing
Overt at JSTOR Daily, Allana Mayer writes about visual literacy in the age of the Internet. As she explains it, “We have similar stories all throughout history: the moment when a perception—whether a literal way of seeing or a figurative mode of thinking—is assaulted and fundamentally shifts.” Pair with our own Bill Morris’s piece on the new Whitney Museum.
Major Shelf Envy
The Guardian has photos of A Little Life author Hanya Yanagihara's New York City apartment and its 12,000 – yes 12,000 – books. Pair with our interview with her from 2015: “It was the worst—the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating—writing experience I'd had. I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I'd somehow become possessed by it.”
High Art
What happened to the literature of clothing? Writers like Balzac and Proust wrote philosophies of clothing, but nowadays there seems to be a wall between literary writing and fashion. In Public Books, Mary Davis reads Women in Clothes, a collection which reveals a lot about how much our views of fashion writing have changed. FYI, Rachel Signer reviewed the book for The Millions.
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Only a Gentile
Jeffrey Goldberg interviews Quentin Tarantino in The Atlantic and writes about why Inglorious Basterds is a very un-Jewish treatment of rage toward Nazis.
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Tabloid Fodder
“Sitting down to read The Actress, Amy Sohn’s newest novel, is even better than standing in line at the grocery store while the person in front of you disputes the price of a carton of orange juice, giving you extra time to read the tabloids. The Actress might be as licentious as a tabloid, but it is far more intelligently written. And, you probably won’t be reading it while standing in line inside a grocery store.”
“Notre Dame is a polarizing place.”
With apologies to Mary McCarthy, our own Bill Morris has revisited memories of his sports-crazed Catholic boyhood in Sunday's New York Times --- specifically why he has been a life-long hater of Notre Dame football.
On Wodehouse’s Other Writing
"For a novelist, writing letters is writing that is not writing," Ed Park says of P.G. Wodehouse's collected correspondence, A Life in Letters. The Year in Reading alum goes on to note that "a collection of letters is the unconscious narrative the author generates over the years."