“Nowadays, we tend to place spies into a cold war narrative: East vs. West, intrigue around the Berlin Wall, Graham Greene’s Vienna, and George Smiley’s London. But the first and most successful Soviet spies emerged much earlier.”
The Ministry of Fear
My Struggle: Special Editions
When all is said and done, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series will consist of six published volumes. In light of the overwhelmingly positive reception for the epic Norwegian books – which have garnered heaps of praise around these parts – Archipelago Books is raising money to produce a special, hardcover edition of each installment.
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E-book Release Delays
An article in the Wall Street Journal about the third publishing house -- HarperCollins, who joined Simon & Schuster and Hachette -- to delay e-book publication of new (hardcover) titles. The debate over timing and pricing of new-release e-books (@$9.99) continues.
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Reading With Our Ears
"But was I actually reading? I regarded myself as a reader, but were these really books?" In LitHub, James Tate Hill pens an essay about reading while visually impaired and the questions it raises in a print book obsessed world. Pair with: our own Bill Morris on hearing an actor narrate his novel's audiobook.
Or, Like Something Out of Kafka
In their latest Trend Watch, Merriam-Webster announced they've been seeing more searches for "Kafkaesque," a spike they attribute to British publishers writing about Booker winner Han Kang. Since the word is so overused, it's worthwhile to ask: just what does it actually mean now, anyway? Allison Flood tries to pin it down at The Guardian.
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The legends and the largely forgotten
The National Book Foundation has an online exhibit of the runners up for the award since its inception in 1950. That's a lot of titles, so you might like to let John Williams be your guide.
Bernhard and Olive Garden
"You could say that Fancy is about a couple of comical old kooks stuck in a dismal town finding creative ways of making themselves (and some luckless bystanders) crazy … and you wouldn’t be wrong. But you could also say that it’s the story of the composition of the manifesto of a bizarre and protean (protozoan?) order of being in which we’re all just patterns mistaking ourselves for people." In a piece for BOMB Magazine, Scott Esposito interviews Jeremy M. Davies about Bernhard, Olive Garden, writing Fancy and reintroducing humor into modernist literature. Their conversation pairs well with our own Nick Ripatrazone's look at, well, the conversations of BOMB interviews.