Novels written by accomplished writers about failed artists are nothing new. What is new is seeing a once-successful novel about a failed artist — one that’s been out-of-print for twenty years — get a burst of renewed attention.
Fail Music
Gah!
Despite your lifelong aversion to robots and crash-test dummies, the Uncanny Valley might not actually be real. At Boing Boing, Maggie Koerth-Baker looks at the evidence that unsettling dolls are just that, unsettling.
●
●
Dem O’s
Recommended Reading: Laura Bogart on growing up in Baltimore.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Koch; Shin; Henríquez, Foulds, Walsh, O’Neill; Dybek
New this week: Summer House With Swimming Pool by Hermann Koch; I’ll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin; The Book of Unknown Americans by Year in Reading alum Cristina Henríquez; In the Wolf’s Mouth by Adam Foulds; The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh; The Girl Who was Saturday Night by Helen O’Neill; and two new books, Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots, by Stuart Dybek.
●
●
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Musa Okwonga Does Not Strive to Be Universal
Author and poet Musa Okwonga discusses In the End, It Was All About Love, a book that required him to be comfortable with the unknown.
●
●
●
The Vulgar and Beautiful
At Big Other, Greg Gerke reads William H. Gass’s The Tunnel and looks at language, the controversy over the book, and how the vulgar and the beautiful relate.
Antebellum YA
Move over Bella and Edward; Scarlett and Rhett were the original young adult power couple. At The New York Times, Claire Needell argues that Gone with the Wind is the epitome of the young adult novel. “The choice between two starkly different lovers (one gentlemanly, one roguish) appears, for the very young, to be a choice between two utterly distinct potential identities, two possible roads through life.”
Um…this novel is not about a “failed writer”–it’s about a former rock star, who, Axl Rose-like, has taken forever to complete his next album, called “Whale Music.”