Don’t feel embarrassed about that trashy novel you’re reading at the beach because summer reading has existed since the 19th Century. Craig Fehrman breaks down the history of pleasure reading. Also, check out our list of alternative “beach” books.
Your Ancestors Would’ve Read Dan Brown
“Blake was all bullshit except for the bomb.”
Millions contributor Nick Ripatrazone – who’s recently written for us about college football and the art of the novella – has new fiction up at storySouth.
When Literary Praise Goes Too Far
More amusement has been prompted by The History of Love author Nicole Krauss’s arguably over-the-top blurb for David Grossman’s To the End of the Land: “To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.” Following Guardian’s subsequent contest for who can write the most absurdly laudatory blurb for a Dan Brown novel, Laura Miller at Salon dissects why author endorsements are so unreliable.
AWP Madness
If you’re going to be at AWP, check out the Flatmancrooked and Mud Luscious Press “Author vs. Puppet” reading (and, yes, puppet show). I’ll be reading/puppeteering, as will novella writers Emma Straub and Alyssa Knickerbocker, among others. The fun starts at the Flatmancrooked booth on Friday at 4 pm!
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Astaroth, Prince of Hell
Here’s to wishing you a spooky Halloween with this piece by Micah Nathan of The Paris Review. Nathan hearkens back to his boyhood–a much simpler time of casual demon-summoning, Satanism, and the occult. This essay by our own Anne K. Yoder will satisfy any lingering desire for the four Humors.
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Looking for a Job? In Space?
Water coolers across the nation were abuzz this week with news of the James Cameron-backed and billionaire-led initiative to begin mining resources from the asteroid belt. It’s the stuff of science fiction, and it may seem hard to believe, but the company’s actually already begun hiring prospective space miners!
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Self-Absorption
A few days ago, our own Kaulie Lewis pointed readers to a LARB essay about Geoff Dyer, which nicely complemented a piece about the author our own Mark O’Connell wrote for Slate back in June. Now, at Full-Stop, David Burr Gerard suggests that Dyer’s strengths, which worked so well in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, may have hampered him in Another Great Day at Sea. FYI, our own Janet Potter reviewed the latter book for The Millions.
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More on Rizzoli’s
Rizzoli’s is closing, but if the owners have their way, there’ll be a Rizzoli’s II opening its doors in the near future. In the meantime, you can read this Times piece about the bookstore, which puts its closing into context.