Wondering what it’s like to have twenty different personalities? Kim Noble can tell you — she’s published a memoir on the topic.
On Better Halves (or Twentieths)
WTF Amazon?!
Need a good way to start your Monday? Try browsing a repository of the craziest, most confusing things Amazon has on offer.
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Branching Out
I’ve written before about Wolf in White Van, the new novel by Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle. But there’s another book out by a prominent artist in a field other than writing: Consumed by David Cronenberg, the director of A History of Violence. Sam Costello reviews the new book over at Full-Stop.
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Lupita Nyong’o + Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie + ‘Americanah’
In book-to-film news, Lupita Nyong’o has signed on to produce and star in an adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‘s novel Americanah, and we couldn’t be more excited. For more from Adichie, be sure to check out her “Year in Reading” piece for The Millions.
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Incredibly Big and Extremely Close
“I have a big global voice, but a small local one, because I don’t want to be a target, and resent that in 2017, that’s still the only choice I get to have. I have a rule of leaving the party, or social space as soon as I see five white people drunk, because the only person who will remember that moment when everybody got hella racist will be me. I have a self-imposed curfew of when to ride my bike home, when to leave the park. I would rather risk my life riding late at night on the empty and mostly dark greenway, than riding on the street with Police officers looking for whoever matches a description.” A Brief History of Seven Killings author Marlon James writes on Facebook (?) about being big, close, and black in the U S of A. Pair with Kaulie Lewis on reading James’s The Book of Night Women during her senior year.
Kids These Days
“The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years,” says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning.
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No Se Habla
Back in March, I pointed readers to an interview with Minae Mizumura, whose recent book, The Fall of Language in the Age of English, makes a case against the dominance of the English language in the modern age. Now, at Full-Stop, Sho Spaeth reviews the book. Sample quote: “She has a curious blindness to what may be her greatest offense of all to the prevailing attitude of our age: a naive rejection of the idea that novels, and their novelists, exist merely to entertain.”
Fighting Words
Mark McGurl author of the book that got everyone talking about MFA programs, The Program Era, mounts a spirited defense against Elif Batuman’s much discussed review of the book. Among his ripostes: “One can be all for the deflation of liberal pieties without being a gleeful ignoramus about it, as though literary journalism needs its own Ann Coulter.” Zing!
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On Literary Blogging
Book Snobbishness: “Using your personal taste or literary standards to dictate to other people what they should spend their time or money on. It’s not just about looking down on someone for reading romance or science fiction (though that’s part of it, of course), but also about shaming readers for where they spend money or the format in which they read.” Amanda Nelson, managing editor of Book Riot, sits down with 0s&1s to talk about gender, books and blogging. To get your fill of literary blogging, check out our list of must-read literary Tumblrs.
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