“Tracing the journey of a mediocre actor and Holocaust survivor ‘touched by some mysterious higher design’ as he forges and impersonates his way through the war and then back to the city of his birth, the story is part Samuel Beckett and part Isaac Bashevis Singer, with a sudden final bolt of O. Henry. It has the flavour of a morality tale, but what’s most fascinating to me is how difficult it is to derive a moral from it, or rather how easy it is to derive more than one and how openly they stand in conflict with each other.” Kevin Brockmeier extols the fiction of Leandro Sarmatz.
The Best of Young Brazil
A Little Bird Told Me
Catapult has a new anonymous column in which a little bird called Magpie collects nice things that happen each week.
But just maybe you’ll beat the odds
If you find yourself in a sporting mood, you can place a bet on who will win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I personally like Alice Munro's 20/1 odds for taking the award, though Haruki Murakami's 10/1 make him the safer bet.
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Emazing
Fans of the French Oulipo movement will know about A Void, the Georges Perec novel written entirely without the use of the letter “e.” What very few readers of any kind know, however, is that in 1939, thirty years before Perec’s novel was published, Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a book in English, Gadsby, that hewed to these same constraints. At The Atlantic, Nikhil Sonnad investigates how this experiment plays out in the book.
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Visiting Main Street
What happens if your town's reputation was made by an author who hated it? Sinclair Lewis grew up in Sauk Centre, Minnesota and scathingly satirized it in Main Street (our Modern Library Revue of it), but it's the town's only claim to fame nearly a century later. At The Morning News, Matt Ray Robison visits.
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Wizard Jail
Recommended Reading: Hannah Rose-Woods on totalitarianism in the wizarding world.
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Go Get A Refund
Unhappy with Go Set A Watchman? You may be able to get your money back. Traverse City's Brilliant Books is offering a refund to customers, as well as an apology for what they feel was a misleading marketing campaign.
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After the Storm
Ten years after hurricane Katrina, Fatima Shaik reflects on freedom of expression, gentrification, and the state of education in New Orleans. You could also check out Gary Rivlin’s Katrina: After the Flood, featured in our 2015 nonfiction preview.
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Tuesday New Release Day: French; Lerner; Finnegan; Iyer; Antrim; Mitchell
New this week: The Secret Place by Tana French; 10:04 by Ben Lerner; Barbarian Days by William Finnegan; Wittgenstein, Jr. by Lars Iyer; The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim; and The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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