“I would have been an abject failure in a writing program. I am not unteachable, but I am probably the only person who can teach myself. I don’t learn extremely well, formally. I wouldn’t even consider myself a very good reader. Maybe a slightly above average reader.” At The Morning News, Robert Birnbaum sits down with Charles Yu.
“I was a failed doctor”
Rilke, Nietzsche, and More in ’90s Movies
For LitHub, Emily Temple compiled 50 literary cameos in '90s movies, ranging from Cher and Peyton Place to Lauryn Hill and Rilke, with plenty of Shakespeare throughout.
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Tuesday New Release Day
New releases this week are Lydia Davis’ new translation of Madame Bovary, Ingrid Betancourt’s memoir Even Silence Has an End, The Prizefighter and the Playwright, a book about the unlikely relationship between George Bernard Shaw and boxer Gene Tunney, and the poetry collection Human Chain by Nobel-Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney.
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Jersey Loyalty
The man who designed Brazil’s famous canary-yellow jersey at age 19 won’t wear it–and not out of charming self-effacement. It’s just that “the shirt is not a symbol of Brazilian citizenship. It is a symbol of corruption and the status quo.” And that he happens to support Uruguayan fútbol.
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Good Company
What do you get when you combine Jorge Louis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda, and W.H. Auden? You get a list of the losers of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was won by the controversial Soviet author Mikhail Sholokhov, who had spoken out against granting the Nobel to Boris Pasternak a few years earlier. Not such bad company on the losing side, there.
Where She Was From
For only $1.65 million, you can have a piece of Joan Didion’s childhood. Her high school home, The Didion House, is on the market in Sacramento. Before you make a bid, it might be good to brush up on California with Didion’s 2003 memoir, Where I Was From.
Ishiguro + Gaiman + Genre
“Why are people so preoccupied? What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?” Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman discuss The Buried Giant, fantasy and genre for the New Statesman. Pair with our own Lydia Kiesling‘s review of the novel.
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Write Across America
The folks at Write By Night are embarking on a quest to organize State Writing Resources (“from conferences to local critique groups to literary magazines”) for all fifty states in our nation. The first two destinations on the docket? Alabama and Alaska, respectively.
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Tuesday New Release Day
Another big, literary title hits shelves today. Tom McCarthy turned heads with Remainder in 2007. Now he’s back with C. Posthumously published is Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey. Also newly released is Sara Gruen’s tale of bonobos and reality television: Ape House, William Gibson’s latest Zero History, and The Widower’s Tale by Julia Glass. Culture mavens will be intrigued by The Official Preppy Handbook reboot True Prep. And this week’s intriguing art book is Full Bleed: New York City Skateboard Photography. And in non-fiction, Bob Dylan In America by Sean Wilentz and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, so compellingly written up in last week’s New Yorker.