Last night I dreamt they made a film about Manderley again.
Rebecca Returns
Maybe he just doesn’t take režektion very well?
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek doesn’t seem very happy these days. Yesterday he published a harsh response to the lukewarm reception NYRB and the Guardian gave his recently published opus, Less Than Nothing. And his declaration that “99% of people are boring idiots” in an recent interview does little to soften his image.
You’ve Probably Never Heard of Him
Is Mark SaFranko the greatest American writer you’ve never heard of? We don’t know, but 3:AM Magazine makes a strong case in this interview with the author who they call an heir to Charles Bukowski and John Fante. Now you’ve heard of him, at least.
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Ann Patchett’s Byliner Original
Ann Patchett is the latest well-known writer with a Kindle Single. The Getaway Car is put out by Byliner, the recently launched champion of long-form journalism, which has recently published updates to Jon Krakauer’s expose of Greg Mortenson.
Read Your McClanahan
Recommended Reading: an excerpt from Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place by Scott McClanahan. We recently featured an article by Eric Obenauf – the book’s publisher – on the benefits of moving away from New York City.
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War and ???
Nowadays, we take it as a given that Tolstoy’s fame was guaranteed by his talent, but many of his contemporaries thought he’d never get a readership outside his native Russia. Why? His writing, as Rosamund Bartlett puts it in a comparison with Turgenev, was “unpolished, more uncompromising and altogether more Russian” than his peers’. If you generally prefer Dostoevsky, you’ll appreciate our survey of scholars on which author was greater. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
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The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Looks like you might want to add Noah Hawley’s new suspense novel Before the Fall to your reading list — this review by the New York Times is effusive in its praise. Check out the other side of what a Times review can do and pair it with this review of Laura Tillman’s The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts, which includes such lines as: “Is a book without judgment, a personal view and confidence in its validity still a book?”
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100 Notable Disappointments
I’m relieved to see I’ve actually read some of the 100 Most Notable Books of 2011. But Rumpus writer Roxane Gay, is pretty disappointed.
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