Pretty good deal on Amazon today: All the e-book versions of the “Best American” books are $1.99.
Best American Books On Sale
“Simultaneously less explicit and more explicit”
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the upcoming Lifetime adaptation of Flowers in the Attic, the novel that Slate writer Tammy Oler called “a rite of passage for teenage girls in the ‘80s.” Now, Willa Paskin reviews the new film, lamenting that it “acts as if it is just another life-affirming Lifetime movie about surviving terrible situations.”
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Treated with Vyvanse
“First, humans domesticated the horse. Then, we invented analgesia for the horses while we got rid of God—eliminating pain while also eliminating pain’s previously greatest meaning. This made a lonely universe. We partially solved loneliness by inventing smartphones, but this also created our now endless distraction—which, fortunately, can be treated with Vyvanse.” Sasha Chapin for Hazlitt on his friend Rachel, who is living with a terminal illness.
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Wednesday Links
Some very cool Hunter S. Thompson photography showing now at an LA gallery. The show coincides with a pricey new “collector’s edition” book that “presents a rare look into the life of Thompson.” (via)Another most literate cities list has arrived. In 2006, Seattle wins, with Minneapolis second. My hometown Washington, DC, is tied for third and LA, where I lived when I started this blog, is eighth. The last two cities I’ve lived in, Chicago (39th) and, now, Philadelphia (tied for 33rd), fail to crack the top ten. Not sure what conclusions I can draw about that, but USA Today draws its own conclusions in an article about the list.Somebody gets into Gwenda’s garbage, her papers fly everywhere, and before you know it, she’s cought in a “indie movie scene wrought with ironic symbolism.” Brilliant.Lesser-Known Editing and Proofreading Marks. Also Brilliant. (via Languagehat)On a more serious note, Tim O’Reilly explains why the book search efforts of Google, et al, are broken. The problem is that we must search in Google’s (or Yahoo’s) walled garden. There is no way to search across all of the books that have been digitized, which is very much at odds with our experience on the Web, where we can search everything at once.
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“Anything but the perfect external man”
Philip Roth may have retired, but that doesn’t mean he’s done giving interviews. The author recently sat down with the editor of a Swedish newspaper, who talked with him about misogyny, Sabbath’s Theater and the need for “obstinacy” in a writer. (Related: our own Hannah Gersen reviewed Roth Unbound.) (h/t The Paris Review)
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‘Mockingbird’ Removed from Reading List
A Mississippi school district has decided to pull Harper Lee‘s To Kill a Mockingbird from its junior-high reading list because it “makes people uncomfortable.” The novel, which frequently tops the American Library Association’s “Frequently Challenged Book” list, tackles racism. See also: an essay on the symbolism of mockingbirds.
The 2016 International Dublin Literary Award Longlist
This morning, the longlist for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award came out, and the nominees include some familiar names. Year in Reading alumnus Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (which won this year’s Pulitzer, whom you can learn more about in this essay by our own Michael Bourne) is on there, as is Year in Reading alumnus Michael Cunningham’s The Snow Queen, Year in Reading alumna Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State (reviewed here by Aboubacar Ndiaye), and A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (winner of this year’s Booker Prize).
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