What’s In A Name?
‘The Joy Luck Club’ Turns 25
On the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan looks back on the landmark novel and its subsequent film adaptation.
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Ask Zadie Anything
“Fiction is messier. Essay is, for me, an attempt at a kind of clarity. I have a very messy and chaotic mind, but when I’m writing an essay I find I can exert a bit more control over it.” The The Guardian published a Q&A with Zadie Smith with questions from fellow authors, politicians, and fans. Smith’s upcoming essay collection, Feel Free, is featured in the first half of our 2018 Great Book Preview.
One Fish, Two Fish
“Everything on the surface of the world is so chaotic right now, so there’s a desire to access a place that’s more uncharted.” The New York Times profiles author Melissa Broder and her new novel, The Pisces (which was part of our Great 2018 Book Preview).
The Right Kind of Ambivalence
In the latest entry in By Heart, which I’ve written about before, Thirty Girls author Susan Minot explains why she prefers to read multiple books at once instead of reading through single books from start to finish. Her reasoning? Books are “worlds to dip in and out of, and my relationship to them is continually deepening and evolving.”
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Yuks of the North
“A Canadian author, a farmer, and a First Nations teenager went fishing. The farmer mostly sat there quietly while the author and the teenager tried to find common ground, even though the gulf between them felt massive.” A Canadian literary scene joke book.
RIP Mavis Gallant
The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant passed away on Tuesday morning at the age of 91. A frequent New Yorker contributor, Gallant published two novels and ten volumes of short fiction in her lifetime, one of which, Home Truths, won the Governor General’s Award. The Globe and Mail’s obituary describes her as having “a journalist’s nose, a cinematographer’s eye and a novelist’s imagination.” (Andrew Saikali wrote about Gallant for The Millions back in 2008.)
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I’m With the Ogres
There’s a tiff going on between Ursula le Guin and Kazuo Ishiguro. After le Guin accused Ishiguro of “despising” the fantasy genre, following an interview with the Times in which he wondered aloud if his readers would be prejudiced against his latest book, Ishiguro defended himself, claiming that he is “firmly on the side of the ogres and the pixies.” You can read a full rundown in The Guardian.
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