Now that Louise Erdrich has won the National Book Award, it’s worth looking back on her interviews from recent years. You can read her piece in the Art of Fiction series, published in 2010 in The Paris Review; you could try her interview with the Times from back in October; or else you could take a look at her sit-down with The New Yorker in April. (This probably goes without saying, but you could also just read her new novel.)
The Author Would Like to Say Something
Positively Freudian
Chances are that your mental image of Pavlov is that of a man giving commands to a barking dog. However, as a new biography makes clear, the doctor who brought us his very own adjective has a far more complicated legacy. In The New Yorker, Michael Specter writes about the man behind the bell.
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Get Ready for Downton Abbey’s Third Season
The third season of Downton Abbey has an official trailer, but to really gear up for the upcoming episodes, you might want to pad your reading list.
On The Road On The Screen
Francis Ford Coppola’s movie adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road may finally see the light of day. The film, directed by Walter Salles and starring the likes of Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams, and Steve Buscemi, could hit French theaters as early as March 23rd.
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More on Sam Anderson’s Marginalia
In his inaugural column for The New York Times Magazine, former New York Magazine critic Sam Anderson expands upon the idea he shared with us in his “Year in Marginalia,” his riff on our big Year in Reading series. And, as a sidebar to Anderson’s column, the Magazine has published a brief excerpt of John Brandon’s compelling essay from The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books (perhaps you’ve heard that title mentioned around here lately?)
On Bookends
We’ve covered The New York Times Bookends column before. This week, James Parker and Liesl Schillinger discuss why we should read books considered “obscene.” Our own Matt Seidel reveals the rejected questions for the Bookends column.
“Cultivate Lightness”
What should you do if, horror of horrors, you find yourself appearing as a character in someone else’s book? Michelle Huneven shares her experience being fictionalized in an essay for The Paris Review. Her advice? “Don’t read too much into it. Cultivate lightness.” Pair with our profile of Huneven, “Not Lost, Just Rearranged.”
Why Art Matters
At the Guardian, Alain de Botton, author of the forthcoming Religion for Atheists, considers whether “museums of art are our new churches” and says “modern museums of art fail to tell people directly why art matters.”
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