At Slate, William Brennan looks at the oeuvre of Shirley Jackson, whose posthumous 1968 collection, Come Along With Me, got reissued recently by Penguin.
Reasons to Remember Her Name
Great to Not Great
At HTML Giant, Jimmy Chen plots famous writers on two axes: Genius to Mediocrity and Arrogance to Modesty. It may offend you (or leave you feeling satisfied) to know that Tom Wolfe is the plot’s most arrogant author.
That’s One Way to Get to Miami
Do you love the city of Miami Beach? Prove it with a poem. At stake is a two night stay at the Catalina Hotel and Beach Club, and the deadline for submissions is December 2nd.
Tuesday New Release Day: Vonnegut, Russo, Wood, Springsteen, Donoghue
Even as much of the Eastern U.S. is lashed by a massive storm, we have new books this week, skewing mostly to non-fiction, including Kurt Vonnegut’s collected letters, Richard Russo’s memoir Elsewhere, James Wood’s collection of essays The Fun Stuff, and Peter Carlin’s authorized biography of Bruce Springsteen. On the fiction side is Emma Donoghue’s Astray.
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The Readability Myth
Is readability a myth? In an article for The Atlantic Noah Berlatsky argues that there are no “easy” or “difficult” books, or rather that these are relative terms – a book that gives one person fits may be light reading for someone else. His argument pairs interestingly with our own Emily Colette Wilkinson‘s “Difficult Books” series.
Booksellers React to Borders’ Bankruptcy
Half of all restaurants that open close,” WORD owner Christine Onorati says. On the other hand, Red Lemonade publisher Richard Nash hopes former Borders employees can find ways to continue “operating as the matchmakers of the book ecosystem.”
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