At The Paris Review, a remembrance of Evan S. Connell, whose work has been cited as an influence by Jonathan Franzen, Lydia Davis and Zadie Smith.
“A quiet hero of contemporary literature”
A6: Edith Wharton
At some point, you’ve probably had a daydream about a vending machine that sells books. Well, guess what. (There’s also a video guide.) (Thanks, Andrew)
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The Book Club to End All Book Clubs
A long discussion of Tenth of December that includes George Saunders himself? Why, Rumpus Book Club, you’re too kind.
Oyster Pirate Turned Novelist
This week in book-related infographics: a look at the surprising day jobs of writers.
Nabokov’s Retranslation
“It has been said of the Beatles that there is not a clunker of a song in their oeuvre because they simply never let the bad stuff get released. The same might be said of Nabokov—for ‘Camera Obscura’ shows that he was indeed capable of writing a second-rate novel. (He knew it, and rewrote it.)” John Colapinto looks at Nabokov‘s retranslation of Laughter in the Dark for The New Yorker.
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Goodbye to King of the Blurbs
Recently, it seemed hard to find a book not blurbed by Gary Shteyngart. He did blurb 150 books in the past decade. Yet now the author has decided to mostly retire from blurbing, he announced in The New Yorker. “Literature can and will go on without my mass blurbing. Perhaps it may even improve.” Pair with: Our own Bill Morris’s essay on whether or not to blurb.