Lydia Millet’s most recent novel, Magnificence, is the third in a trilogy, and a reminder of what a significant body of work she’s been building over the last decade. The Point offers the best overview of that work you’re likely to find anywhere. Millet’s “equal parts” Ben Marcus and Jonathan Franzen, writes Tom Dibblee, “but really she’s her own thing.”
Lydia Millet, Dark Princess of Love
All in the Family
Anne Enright, who won the Man Booker for her 2007 novel, The Gathering, has a new book out, The Green Road. Like its predecessor, the novel tracks a large Irish family, the Madigans, in a plotline that spans three decades. In the Times, David Leavitt reviews the book.
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The First Book Flown to the Moon
Alyssa Lukpat on the tiny book Buzz Aldrin took with him on the history-making voyage to the moon.
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Fini
Recommended Reading: Colm Tóibín reads a new French novel, The End of Eddy.
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Take Shelter
“I found it hard to escape the sensation that I’d be teaching inside a giant metaphor.” Rachel Kadish once taught a creative writing class in a bomb shelter, but rather than stifling her students’ work, it allowed her to see how writing can act as a shelter, too.
Computers Grading Papers?
The Hewlett Foundation is offering $100,000 to anyone who can create an “automated essay grader” (and in the process cost thousands of TAs their jobs).
The Inmates Have Taken Over
“Summer morning is risen / and to even it wends / and still I’m in prison / without any friends.” Start your Monday off right with this piece from The Paris Review on John Clare, Christopher Smart, and the poetry of the asylum. Speaking of the madhouse, here’s a piece on Anne Sexton and her book Transformations.
Station Eleven Preview
A. A. Knopf posted the first chapter of our own Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Station Eleven, on Scribd for all to see and enjoy.
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