At long last Renata Adler’s re-released Speedboat is out from NYRB Classics. The book’s attracted quite a bit of (deserved) pre-release hype. Also out today are a pair of books covered in our Great 2013 Book Preview: Vladimir Nabokov’s The Tragedy of Mr. Morn (no relation to yours truly) and Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives. In three days you can get your hands on Kristopher Jansma’s debut novel The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards.
Tuesday New Release Day: Adler, Nabokov, Hemon, Jansma
Esterházy in Manhattan
Tonight at 8, the 92nd Street Y in New York hosts Millions favorite Péter Esterházy, author of the amazing Celestial Harmonies. András Schiff offers musical interludes. Look for an interview here in the next couple of weeks.
Novel Projects
“Well, is ‘addiction’ what a literary writer should want in readers? And if a writer accepts such addiction, or even rejoices in it, as Murakami seems to, doesn’t it put pressure on him, as pusher, to offer more of the same?” Tim Parks writes for the NYRB about writers who keep producing more of the same to please hungry readers.
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On Sexism in Literature
How do you feel about claims that men avoid reading women? Before you answer, consider this piece, which argues that sexism in the lit world is more complicated than it may appear. (For more, go check out our own piece on sexism on the internet, or else take a look at this Harvard Divinity School study on how sexism shapes responses to women’s writing.)
Dangerous Novels
"The idea that novels could be dangerous seems largely have fallen by the wayside, which does raise the question of how today’s newer sources of entertainment and information will look to the critics of the future. In 50 years, maybe we’ll be lamenting our failure to read enough Internet." Anna North writes about the distant time "When Novels Were Bad For You" for The New York Times.
“Madness and Meaning”
From Nebuchadnezzar to Hippocrates to the Victorian asylum: The Paris Review takes a look at mental illness and its treatments across the centuries.
An Oral History of Oral Histories
Last week, I called 2011 "the year of television's oral history" because of the bevy of recently published oral history books. As it turns out, the explosion is part of a trend, as Michaelangelo Matos notes in this piece for The Daily.
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