You can listen to stories by Michel Faber and Roxane Gay over at WNYC’s website. Gay’s piece, which is performed by Adepero Oduye, was recently selected to appear in The Best American Short Stories.
Saturday Fiction with Faber and Gay
Bathtub Books
“At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I’m a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free,” Rachel Kushner told The New York Times in a “By the Book” interview. Yet just because her reading style is leisurely doesn’t mean her reading is; she discusses her love of Proust and avoidance of books known for their plots. For more Kushner, read our own interview with her or her 2013 Year in Reading post.
The Collector of Baskervilles
If there’s anyone more obsessive than Sherlock Holmes, it’s Glen Miranker. The former Apple executive owns the largest private collection of Sherlock Holmes works, totaling 4,500 items including books, manuscripts, illustrations, and other oddities. How he amassed such a collection isn’t a mystery — he’s been at it since the 1970s.
Tuesday New Release Day: Rash, Gavin, Hainey
New this week: a pair of highly anticipated collections, Nothing Gold Can Stay by Ron Rash and Middle Men by Jim Gavin. Also out is Michael Hainey’s intriguing memoir chronicling his investigation into his father’s mysterious death, After Visiting Friends.
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Auditing The Pale King
Two writers dive deep into David Foster Wallace’s posthumous Pulitzer finalist novel, The Pale King. Seth Colter Walls takes a look at the tax classes the author took before he began writing, and Eliot Caroom checks the facts laid out in Wallace’s portrayal of the IRS. (Related: the opening lines of The Pale King, and a previously unpublished scene as well.)
“My name is Geoff Dyer and I endorse this.”
Geoff Dyer endorses Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station , John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead –our own Bill Morris loves it too!–and a generalized aversion toward seafood in his interview with Morten Høi Jensen for Book Forum. While they ostensibly met to talk about Zona–reviewed on The Millions here–it’s perhaps unsurprising that they managed to digress so liberally: “we chatted about his review of Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis: the Biography, and by the end he was giving me advice about which David Markson book I should read first. Our interview, in other words, assumed the shape of a Geoff Dyer book.”
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“Requisite dog bark. Far off.”
Recommended Reading: “Bitter Night in the Country” by Hayden Saunier.