Our own Lydia Kiesling hit up our own Patrick Brown’s Goodreads LitQuiz to battle for first place in the competitive world of San Franciscan Literary Trivia, and wrote up her trivial trials and tribulations for #LitBeat.
#LitBeat hits LitQuake for a LitQuiz
“I’ve set the bar quite high in terms of storytelling”
Fifty Shades of Grey author E L James has two more books up her sleeve, USA Today reports. One is another erotic novel, but the other is intended for young adults.
●
●
A Matter of Time
Does literature have to be timeless? Over at Electric Literature, Kevin Pickard debates pop culture references in novels. Pair with Bill Morris’s Millions essay on books about the near future.
●
●
An Eastern Bloc Monument
Cheers to Joshua Cohen for this early look at Péter Nádas’ mind-bending magnum opus, Parallel Stories. Our own review will appear sometime in 2014, when we finish reading. (But we can already say that all 1,100-page novels should begin, as this one does, with a dead body.)
The Brief Wondrous Influences of Junot Díaz
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao author Junot Díaz lists the movies, TV shows and books that most influenced him at Vulture.
●
●
Stir Gently
Cookbooks, in general, are resistant to close reading, if only because their authors are barely present in the text, if at all. Yet sometimes we can discern a personality through the measurements and shopping lists. At Page-Turner, Kathleen Alcott reads the cookbooks of Nigel Slater. Pair with our own Hannah Gersen on reading cookbooks as literature.
●
●
Commence Griping Now
The first images from Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina motion picture adaptation are now online. Behold Keira Knightley as Anna, and Jude Law as Alexei! The film will release in the UK on September 7th.
●
●
Rough Starts
“I struggled, quite a bit, writing this review. Reviewing books, while easy in certain ways — you have certain aspects of form to follow, there are certain features of books that cannot go unremarked: one must write about character, about language, about technique — and really a rather simple process (much simpler, it would seem, than writing books), can also be a pain. Especially, frustratingly enough, when the book is really good.” On Lola Lafon’s We Are the Birds of the Coming Storm.
●
●