Writing for NPR’s Book News round-up, Annalisa Quinn steers readers toward a recently released FBI file alleging that Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes was in fact a “communist writer” with a “long history of subversive connections.” In her update, Quinn shares some counter-arguments from Fuentes’s colleague and biographer, Julio Ortega.
Carlos Fuentes: Subversive Communist?
Happy Ministries
Fans of Arundhati Roy are celebrating at the news that the author will publish a new novel, her first in 20 years, reports Electric Literature; The Ministry of Utmost Unhappiness is scheduled for release in 2017. Our own Garth Risk Hallberg maaaaay have poked a bit of fun a few years back at the title of Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things, but that was all in good fun.
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Brutality and Pragmatism
“Will anyone in America give a damn about Beig? It’s hard to imagine our glittering zeitgest machine ever getting behind her, with her landscape, her women, her knowledge of the secret lives of animals born for the hatchet. Her writing, so invested in the disappearing rural world, is particular, yes, but universal: her characters love and long and pine away.” Matthew Neill Null is unsatisfied with how American readers have treated the work of the great German novelist Maria Beig. He makes a passionate case in her favor in this new essay over at The Paris Review.
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Super YA
What if the Hulk kept a diary? Marvel Entertainment’s new young adult books mix superheroes with chicklit. The She-Hulk Diaries and Rogue Touch, featuring the X-Men super heroine as a teenager, are bringing romance back to comics. The biggest surprise, they’re actually good, according to critics at Wired.
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Feral Houses
Cities like Detroit and Cleveland aren't dying, Anne Trubek says. Growth is everywhere.
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Contrarian
In 1952, John Steinbeck wrote that Al Capp, the cartoonist and Lil’ Abner creator, might well have been the best writer working in the world at the time. In the Times, Andy Webster reviews a new biography of Capp, which reveals that underneath it all lay “a toxic chip on his shoulder.”
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