Todd Field, who directed In the Bedroom and Little Children, is going to bring Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins to the big screen. The book was a big favorite among this year’s Year In Reading contributors.
Coming Soon: Beautiful Ruins
Dr. Doyle
When Arthur Conan Doyle wasn’t writing Sherlock Holmes, he was a practicing doctor. Thomas Goetz’s new book The Remedy discusses the history of tuberculosis and Doyle’s role in finding a cure with Robert Koch. The Daily Beast interviewed Goetz about how he came up with the idea for the book. “These two characters were part of a much larger story about how scientific discoveries evolve into social change.”
What Makes the Pages Turn?
Recommended Reading: Do we read books for the plot or the characters?
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“Norman was the very antithesis of minimalism”
Apart from calling up visions of a Carver–Mailer axis of literary minimalism, these remarks by Joyce Carol Oates upon winning the Mailer Prize convince us that Mailer had quite the unflappable ego.
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Necessary Nabokov
Christopher Michel discusses The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov – a book that challenges the long-held consensus that Nabokov was merely an aesthete.
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Tuesday, Big New Release Day
The big, blockbuster book this week is the final installment in the late Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Those just catching on to the Larsson phenomenon can also now get the complete set. Moving on to quirkier fare, there’s The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto, a reprint of a 1950s treatise on drinking with a new introduction by Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket). And finally, Library of America is putting out a volume of novels and stories by master of gothic fiction, Shirley Jackson.
Walk, Don’t Run
Haruki Murakami retired his running shoes to walk to Kobe and rediscover his hometown. “Strictly speaking, it’s not my home town any more. I feel a deep sense of loss at this fact, as if the axis of my memories is faintly, but audibly, creaking within me. It’s a physical sensation,” he writes in an essay for Granta.
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Between the Pages, Between the Sheets
Attention promiscuous literary types, the September issue of Bookslut is now online.
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