A very big week for new books: See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid; My Brother’s Book, the last book completed by Maurice Sendak before his death in May 2012; How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields; The City of Devi by Manil Suri; a new edition of Breakfast at Tiffany’s & Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote; The Love Song of Jonny Valentine by Teddy Wayne (see our interview today); P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters; Wise Men by Stuart Nadler; debut novels Autobiography of Us by Aria Beth Sloss and Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer; City of Angels, an autobiographical novel by Christa Wolf; and House of Earth, the lost novel of Woody Guthrie.
Tuesday New Release Day: Kincaid, Sendak, Shields, Suri, Capote, Wayne, Wodehouse, Nadler, Sloss, Bauer, Wolf, Guthrie
You Tell Me What to Say
"I'm trying to think of something really suitable to say. What do you think I should say? Look, you tell me what to say and I'll say it." That was Doris Lessing, who found out she'd won the Nobel Prize from a group of journalists who surrounded her when she was exiting a taxi. NPR has that great audio, plus other reactions of former Nobel literature laureates, including Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Our own fearless editor-in-chief, Lydia Kiesling, admires Lessing, but felt rather differently about reading one of her most famous works, The Golden Notebook: "Among other things, she did an uncanny job of creating a malaise that was actually infectious. It oozed right off the page and into my own spirit."
e-lending leads to more reading?
According to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life project, library patrons borrowing ebooks tend to read more than readers who aren't borrowing ebooks. Galley Cat parsed some of the data if you' want the short rather than the long of it.
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Against Writers’ Houses
April Bernard is not a fan of Writers' Houses because she does not believe the "private life, even of the dead, is ours to plunder." Earlier this year, our own Luke Epplin also noted some of the limitations of Writers' Houses.
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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.
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A Century of Cheever
Allan Gurganus commemorates the 100th anniversary of his teacher and friend John Cheever’s birth. “Cheever, now unfairly known as the gloomy, sodden satyr of suburbia,” Gurganus writes, “was at least rarely gloomy. Fact is he was more fun per minute than is legal in a nation this Republican.”
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Valleyspeak
Curious to know what the new Most Irritating Word is? Not many people agree on the number one offender, but for a while a top choice was “literally,” which evolved so much over the past few decades that the Oxford English Dictionary revised its official definition. At Slate, Katy Waldman proposed that we give the title to “amazeballs.” Now, in The New Republic, Judith Shulevitz makes the case for “disruptive,” the scourge of the tech world.
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Literary Street Art
Emily Smith discusses the place of zines in contemporary American politics, over at Ploughshares. As she puts it, “Zines, like street art, are allowed critical power through anonymity—a function newsstand periodicals simply can’t perform for the sake of reputation or the sacrifice of advertisers. In this way, zines are small-scale democracies.”
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