Among the many quotable and occasionally perplexing lines in this interview with V. S. Naipual is this one, which the Bend In The River author drops upon hearing that his interviewer, Isaac Chotiner, is a fan of P. G. Wodehouse: “I can’t read Wodehouse. The thought of, shall we say, facing three or four months of nothing but Wodehouse novels fills me with horror.”
V. S. Naipaul talks Reading, Writing, The Arab Spring, and Wodehouse
High Praise for Rebecca Solnit
In a new issue of N1BR, Nikil Saval takes a look at Rebecca Solnit‘s latest, calling its predecessor River of Shadows “surely one of the best books of the past decade.”
The Materialist
Object narrative (n): a story told through meditations on various physical objects. Examples include Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes; Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects; and Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things.
Hell is Other People
The Morning News posts a terrific (if slightly ingenuous?) take on the vacuity of the poet’s life in NYC: Frank O’Hara it ain’t. Whether this is a failure of the city, or merely of the poet, is an open question. (via The Book Bench).
Interview with John Darnielle
Recommended viewing: John Darnielle talks about his debut novel, Wolf in White Van, in a video for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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