“‘You can tell how serious people are by looking at their books,’ Susan Sontag told Sigrid Nunez.” The meaning of book shelves.
Shelf Life
Elaborate Gilded Contraptions
I wonder if this historical look at the crafting of espresso machines in The Smithsonian will make you think, as I did, about how incredibly Steam Punk a good cappuccino can be.
DeLillo and Trance States
Charles Baxter notes, “If you have read several books by Don DeLillo, sooner or later you will have a Don DeLillo moment.” For Baxter, these are often “trance states,” of which DeLillo’s newest collection, The Angel Esmeralda, contains many.
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“I’ll Read Anything”
“If the sentences are meticulously made, I’ll read anything, whether it’s as destabilizing as a Gary Lutz short story or as melancholy as a Chris Ware comic. The only books I give up on are texts where the writer’s attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless.” Anthony Doerr, whose All The Light We Cannot See won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, discusses genre, Calvin and Hobbes, and the 2,080 books he still wants to read as part of the New York Times Book Review‘s By the Book series.
Brunonia
Recommended Reading: Chris Power on Maxim Biller’s Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz.
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Rick Moody, Life Coach
“This seems to me the much more complex human truth … that for every theorist of the physical, as with every brainless brawler out in front of a tavern, there is a spot in him in which he aspires to the spirit. Always the flickering of the spiritual in which we reach for better. This is the ambition that changes those who aspire to it.” Here is the latest installment in The Literary Hub’s brave, groundbreaking series “Rick Moody: Life Coach.” This week finds Moody urging his reader along a path of nonviolence. Last time he took on crying.
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