Last week, the artist Jason Novak did the impossible and sketched out Finnegans Wake. Apparently it wasn’t enough, though, because now he’s drawn In Search of Lost Time.
The Impossible, Part Deux
Hustle and Flow
The writer needs to be a hustler to survive, essayist Aaron Gilbreath argues. He literally took to the streets of Portland to hand sell his work. Pair with our essay, “Instant Lessons: First Novel Karma.”
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The New YA Royalty
Move over Shailene Woodley and Jennifer Lawrence because Chloë Grace Moretz is about to become the YA queen. The trailer for her adaptation of Gayle Forman’s If I Stay just came out. Next, she will be trading tearjerkers for dystopias in an adaptation of Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave.
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Tuesday New Release Day: McEwan; O’Neill; Tsiolkas; Giraldi; Jones; Gluck; Goldberg; Hunt; Mandel
Out this week: The Children Act by Ian McEwan; The Dog by Joseph O’Neill; Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas; Hold the Dark by William Giraldi; Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones; Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück; Gangsterland by Tod Goldberg; Happiness: Ten Years of n + 1; Neverhome by Laird Hunt; and Station Eleven by our own Emily St. John Mandel. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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State of Terror
Junot Diaz, whose novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008, has been deemed “un-patriotic” and “anti-Dominican” by the Dominican Republic’s consul in New York City. Diaz had been working in Washington with Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat in the hopes of urging the U.S. government to take action against the abhorrent treatment of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic.
RIP Harper Lee
Harper Lee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, died this morning in Monroeville, Alabama at the age of 89. Lee won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for Mockingbird, which later formed the basis of a film starring Gregory Peck. To learn more about her legacy, you could read our own Michael Bourne on the hidden character of Atticus Finch, or else read Robert Rea on a pilgrimage he took to her home.
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Foetry Chronicles
Brett Ortler, a blogger at Bark, chronicles his effort to figure out why indie publisher, BlazeVOX, wants to charge him $250 to publish his book of poems. Follow-up posts reveal, first, that BlazeVOX has rescinded the pay-to-play scheme, and, second, that it now plans to go out of business by the end of the year.
Now on Kindle
Three days after Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the Times wrote about Katharine Weymouth taking over the Washington Post, Jeff Farhi reports that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has agreed to purchase the newspaper. Will Bezos follow up his purchase of English™ with a brand-new WaPo style guide?
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