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
Let’s Get a Move On, Scientists
David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years (which was brilliantly reviewed by Benjamin Kunkel in the LRB recently), wonders why the world doesn’t yet have any flying cars. It’s 2012, people!
Zeitoun Charged with a Murder Plot
Abdulrahman Zeitoun has been charged with plotting to kill his wife, her son and another man. The protagonist of Dave Eggers’s bestselling (and Millions Hall of Famer) Zeitoun has had a spate of legal troubles since the book’s 2009 release, most of which related to charges of domestic battery. You can read Eggers's statement on the matter over here. One has to wonder how these ongoing arrests will affect the forthcoming animated film based on Eggers’s book, which was scheduled for a 2014 premiere.
Every Love Story Gets a Book Trailer
The book trailer is out for Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D. T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace -- it features a brief cameo from yours truly. The book’s opening paragraphs appeared on our site this week, too.
Are You Experienced?
Who's the Jimi Hendrix of Wordstock? Though it is unlikely to become a lasting cultural landmark the caliber of Woodstock, the recent Wordstock festival in Portland was nonetheless a runaway success for its 6,000 attendees. This piece on the London Book Fair has a decidedly different tone.
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It’s the reader.
In his review of Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet for the LARB, Lee Konstantinou suggests that we have now moved well beyond the death of the author: "In an era where everyone has a novel waiting to come out, authors are legion; it’s the reader who seems, well, dead." When we interviewed Marcus earlier this year he did not seem particularly mournful. We also reviewed the novel.
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New York Magazine Previews the Fall
In New York Magazine, critic Sam Anderson offers a list of this fall's Most Anticipated Books. (We posted our own in July.)
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He Is Not Pynchon
Penguin released a book trailer for the newest Thomas Pynchon novel in which a guy in a T-shirt that reads “I’m Pynchon” stands on a rooftop on the “Yupper” West Side and talks about his life. (To find out why I used the term “Yupper,” check out the recent New York mag piece on Pynchon that I wrote about last week.)
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