As part of their Five Books series, The Browser interviews Colin Thubron, a travel writer from the UK (and author of a recent book on Tibet) who shares his favorite books from the genre.
Wanderlit
Iainbanks Is Hurtling Through Space
J.L. Galache wanted to honor the recently deceased Iain Banks in a way befitting the man’s memory. So of course he named an asteroid after the author. With the help of Dr. Gareth Williams of the Minor Planet Center, Galache successfully lobbied the Committee for Small Body Nomencalture of the International Astronomical Union for Asteroid 5099 to be officially dubbed Iainbanks. (Bonus: John McIntyre honors Banks’s memory by reading through some of his best work.)
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DFW’s postcard to Don DeLillo
In addition to our own annotation of David Foster Wallace's work today, Electric Literature's blog has a great little piece of literary history up in the form of a postcard he wrote to Don DeLillo.
Moldy Links
The book bloggers are all waiting for the announcement of the National Book Award winner, and I, too, have to wonder what will happen once we know the recipient of the award in the fiction category. These women have gotten a lot of grief from folks who think they shouldn't be there. What I'm wondering is will the NY Times and all the rest end their crusade and graciously accept the winner, or will the winner, whoever she may be, have to bear more criticism on her own. We shall see. In the meantime I have dug up some old links that are, unlike all this NBA stuff, not very timely, but they are good, so I wanted to share them with you:First, take a look at Jonathan Yardley's fantastic discussion of the American novels that are, to his mind, the best of the last 125 years. He calls it "State of the Art."The discussion among my fellow book bloggers about the Paris Reviews magnificent decision to put all of their interviews online has got me thinking about the recently departed George Plimpton, which is why I was happy to find this wonderful interview that he conducted with Truman Capote about In Cold BloodFinally, there are two types of people in this world... well, not really, but in this post from earlier this year, Michael at 2Blowhards explains the difference between movie people and book people and a lively discussion follows.Well, that's enough from the old bookmarks file. Expect more timely news sometime soon.
The Quality of No Qualities
The new book Robert Musil and the NonModern offers David Winters a chance to revisit The Man Without Qualities. (While you're at it, check out the essay on literary theory Winters wrote for us in September...and Matthew Gallaway's piece on Musil from January.)
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New York: It Isn’t All That
Roxane Gay rounded up some of her favorite writers from “Outside of New York City.” (And she's not talking about Brooklyn.)
LA Review of Self-Published Books
The Los Angeles Review will start reviewing one self-published book each month. They plan on applying "the same standards of good literature" to their reviews of self-published content as they do to traditionally published content.
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