“Renowned author Dan Brown got out of his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house and paced the bedroom, using the feet located at the ends of his two legs to propel him forwards.”
The Renowned Dan Brown
When A Critic Becomes An Author
Vanity Fair talks to renowned book critic Michiko Kakutani about her debut The Death of Truth and why she decided to become an author.
On Fiction, On Envy
“Jealousy baffles me. It’s so mysterious and it’s so pervasive. … And yet I’ve never read a study that can parse to me its loneliness, or its longevity, or its grim thrill. For that, we have to go to fiction because the novel is the lab that has studied jealousy in every possible configuration. In fact, I don’t know that it’s an exaggeration to say that if we didn’t have jealousy, we wouldn’t even have literature.” New York Times Book Review editor Parul Sehgal takes listeners to church in her TED Talk, “Ode to Envy.”
Oh, Gross
Over at The Paris Review, Hannah Tennant-Moore defends the merits of disturbing literature. We are fascinated with the disturbing, because, as Tennant-Moore asserts, "wonder, disgust: both feelings are true." Here's a bonus piece on A.M. Homes' darkly comic May We Be Forgiven and on comforting the disturbed -- or is it disturbing the comforted?
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Someone’s in Hot Water
Sure, James Cameron's deep sea dive was cool, but talk to me when he does it in nuclear waters. Then I'll be impressed.
Tuesday New Release Day: Shriver, Leyner, Keret, Sebald, Larkin
New this week are The New Republic by Lionel Shriver, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner, Suddenly, a Knock at the Door by Etgar Keret, W.G. Sebald's Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001, and The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin.
The Nobel Isn’t Everything
Wole Soyinka does not approve of the push for Chinua Achebe to be awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize for Literature, and he doesn’t appreciate fan letters asking for his support to that end. “How did creative valuation descend to such banality?” Soyinka remarks in an interview with SaharaReporters. “Do these people know what they're doing – they are inscribing Chinua's epitaph in the negative mode of thwarted expectations. I find that disgusting.”
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Cubans, Minimalists, and Surrealists, Oh My!
A three-course feast for your eyes, dear readers: vintage Cuban movie posters courtesy of Will Schofield; minimalist book covers courtesy of Julie Oreskovich and AbeBooks; and little-known sheet music illustrations courtesy of the great René Magritte.
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Novelcraft
“I war-gamed out everything. My biggest fear was that somebody tries to play out my book and finds out it won’t work.” At The New York Times, Alexandra Alter writes about the new Minecraft novel by Max Brooks, author of World War Z: “In the process, he may have also created a strange new entertainment category, one that hovers somewhere between fan fiction, role-playing games and literature — a novel set in a game, that can itself be played within the game.” And while we're on the topic of games, let's also talk about geekdom and race.
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