Read a lot of Granta? Want to hang out with Brazilians? The magazine is hosting a number of events to celebrate its cool new collection.
Obrigada, Senhora
Party in the City Where the Book Fair’s On
South Florida readers! Assuming you’re done voting by now, you should make next week’s Miami Book Fair International a priority. Afterward, you can go celebrate thirty years of Books & Books, the jewel of Coral Gables. (And perhaps to warm up for it all, you can read my review of Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood.)
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Win Zak Smith’s Gravity’s Rainbow
The Quarterly Conversation is holding a contest for readers. They'll be giving away a hardcover copy of Zak Smith's illustrated Gravity's Rainbow.
The Investigation of Feeling
Recommended Listening: Poet Rachel Zucker speaks with Citizen author Claudia Rankine about willed ignorance and the known unknown.
Supplementing Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño's posthumous releases may rival Tupac's in quantity. Indeed, the author "sustains an interest in Latin American literature all by himself," writes Robert Birnbaum. But what if you want to broaden your survey of Latin and South American literature? Well, luckily, Birnbaum's got some recommendations for you.
Beat That
Peter Ackroyd, a man who T Magazine writer Jody Rosen calls "[an] insanely prolific, controversial and eccentric novelist and historian,” has published, at last count, nearly 6,500 pages of text. That incredible figure equates to more than fifty books, many of them with titles like Dickens: Public Life and Private Passions. (At present, he’s working on a biography of Alfred Hitchcock.)
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Navigating Past Nihilism
"Without any clear and agreed upon sense for what to be aiming at in a life, people may experience the paralyzing type of indecision depicted by T.S. Eliot in his famously vacillating character Prufrock; or they may feel, like the characters in a Samuel Beckett play, as though they are continuously waiting for something to become clear… or they may feel the kind of “stomach level sadness” that David Foster Wallace described…" Sean D. Kelly navigates past nihilism for the New York Times.
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