I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud

“Save one life save the world, instructs the Talmud… You can’t save every life. You can’t save every book. But you can at least throw lifelines now and then.” Susan Coll writes for The Atlantic about the power of shelving and the importance of staying hopeful, no matter how gloomy publishing becomes.

Recommended (Long) Reading: This lengthy excerpt from the latest book in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. In it, Knausgaard is introduced to the literary world and stresses a great deal over his own claims to artistic merit: “Deep down, I was decent and proper, a goody-goody, and, I thought, perhaps that was also why I couldn’t write. I wasn’t wild enough, not artistic enough, in short, much too normal for my writing to take off. What had made me believe anything else? Oh, but this was the life-lie.”

Recommended Reading: Clare Beams writes for Ploughshares about the effect of reading a story in which someone reads a story.

“[T]hat might be what liberal readers needs right now: Not just portraits of the Brexit and Trump-voting domestic Other, but a clearer sense of their own worldview’s limits, blind spots, blunders and internal contradictions.” The New York Times‘s Ross Douthat assembles a “Books for the Trump Era” reading list, including Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Christopher Lasch‘s The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, and Samuel P. Huntington‘s Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity. You can also read our own review of Houellebecq’s latest here.