It’s a truth as old as academia: graduate students moan about the lengths of their dissertations. But which grad students are most entitled to complain? Herewith, a chart that compares dissertation lengths by major.
The Right to Complain
New Joan Didion Memoir
Joan Didion has finished work on a new memoir about aging. It is to be titled Blue Nights and will be published by Knopf in 2011.
Michel Houellebecq on the Art of Fiction
Susannah Hunnewell interviews Michel Houellebecq, France’s controversial literary icon, for The Paris Review's "The Art of Fiction" series: “There is a need for intensity. From time to time, you have to forsake harmony. You even have to forsake truth. You have to, when you need to, energetically embrace excessive things.”
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An Act of Creation and Destruction
Recommended Listening: David Naimon interviews Year in Reading alumnus Jesse Ball about his latest book, How to Set a Fire and Why—one of the most anticipated books of 2016.
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The Private, Intimate Sphere
Read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s acceptance speech for the Welt Literaturpreis, an annual prize awarded by the German newspaper Die Welt, at The New Yorker. He writes, “The difference between engaging with a real neighbor and one in a novel is that the former occurs in the social sphere, within the boundaries of its rules and practical constraints, whereas the latter occurs outside of it, in the reader’s own most private, intimate sphere, where the rules that govern our social interaction do not apply and its practical constraints do not exist.” You could also check out Knausgaard’s book excerpt at The Millions.
Best in Translation
"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." NPR reminds us of this great quote from Haruki Murakami before rounding up its five favorite books in translation for 2016, including Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear (originally published in German) and The Clouds by Juan José Saer. And from our archives: translator Alison Anderson on “Ferrante Fever” and what a great translation adds to the original work.
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