Recommended Reading: Hotel Iris author Yoko Ogawa’s fiction in Guernica, “The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger.”
Recommended Reading: Yoko Ogawa
No Multiverse For Old Men
Recommended Reading: This dizzying essay from Seb Sutcliffe at 3:AM Magazine on quantum theory in the world of the Coen Brothers. Here’s a complementary essay from The Millions on DVD commentary and paratext novels.
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Wrecked Modern Romance
“[Virginie] Despentes has become a kind of cult hero, a patron saint to invisible women: the monstrous and marginalized, the sodden, weary and wildly unemployable, the kind of woman who can scarcely be propped up let alone persuaded to lean in.” On Virginie Despentes’s Bye Bye Blondie and French feminist pulp that pulls no punches.
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Marlon James’s Minnesota
“In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them. By now, the person I created in New York was the only one I wanted to be. …Eight years after reaching the end of myself, I was on borrowed time. Whether it was in a plane or a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica.” Marlon James, author of The Book of Night Women, which once gave me so much trouble, and whose novel A Brief History of Seven Killings the Book Report covered here, writes for the New York Times Magazine about leaving Jamaica to find himself in Minnesota.
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The Dead and the Pre-Dead
“For obit writers, the whole world is necessarily divided into the dead and the pre-dead. That’s all there is.” The Paris Review interviews Margalit Fox, a senior writer for The New York Times, on the complicated art of obituaries.
The Class of 2013
The Public Domain Review takes a look at the “Class of 2013,” a k a their “top pick of artists and writers whose works will, on 1st January 2013, be entering the public domain.” Among the names highlighted is Robert Musil, whose novel The Man Without Qualities was reviewed on our site by Matthew Gallaway.
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