At Page-Turner, our own Mark O’Connell notes “a thrilling obscenity” in the works of Gonçalo M. Tavares, a Portuguese writer whose recent novel, Jerusalem, depicts a character with schizophrenia. A lesser-known symptom of the illness, apparently, is a tendency to treat inanimate objects like conscious (and social) beings. (We wrote about Tavares back in March.)
On Doormats and Shoes
Nabokov on the Run
One hundred years ago this week, a teenage boy named Vladimir Nabokov fled revolutionary Russia with his family for the safety of Western Europe.
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World Book Night
A committee headed by the author Tracy Chevalier this week unveiled the lineup of twenty-five specially printed titles which will be distributed by thousands of volunteers across the UK on April 23, 2012 as part of an international celebration of reading.
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Writing About Home in Pittsburgh
A nice complement to Edan’s essay today about writing in Los Angeles, The Metropolis Case author Matthew Gallaway writes about the challenges of representing his home city of Pittsburgh in his fiction. “For starters, there’s the question of accuracy.”
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Critterati
Happy Halloween! At the New Yorker, the winners of the dress your pet as a literary character contest. Don’t miss the honorable mentions (I’m partial to the feline Moby Dick).
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“A hustler wrote this?”
“The book documents its time, a time when homosexuality was illegal, and still described in medical books as a mental illness. It is one of the best firsthand accounts of what it was like to be gay in the mid-20th century — ostracized — separate from the mainstream world. It reveals, through its characters, how young men couldn’t admit, even to themselves, that they were what society deemed perverted.” On the novel City of Night by John Rechy.
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Russian Slapstick
“Russian humor is to ordinary humor what backwoods fundamentalist poisonous snake handling is to a petting zoo. Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die.” Ian Frazier writes about the strange humor of Daniil Kharms for the New York Review of Books.
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