Surely you’ve heard the hype by now. Surely you’ve seen someone blushing and shifting their eyes askance while reading this book in public. Well, now you can get a taste of what the fuss is all about. You can read the beginning of Alissa Nutting’s Tampa courtesy of Dzanc Books and The Collagist.
“He’s too good-looking”
“I don’t believe the reader needs to know anything about me.”
Ben Lerner has a story [subscription required] in this week’s New Yorker that, like his debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station, features a protagonist named The Author. The magazine interviewed Lerner about the invitation to blur his fiction with his autobiography. He says that his work in an exercise in “activating those questions in peculiar ways—but the questions, not the answers, are what strike me as interesting.”
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Literary Map of Manhattan
An interactive literary map of Manhattan, at The New York Times Book Review: “Here’s where imaginary New Yorkers lived, worked, played, drank, walked and looked at ducks.” (via The Rumpus)
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Watching A Wrinkle in Time
The movie adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time premiered this week. Before or after you see the movie (there are some spoilers if you haven’t seen it or read the book) read this essay by Alanna Bennett on the simple, but revolutionary power of the story and Ava DuVernay’s book-to-screen vision.
Mermaids and Capital
If the description “a comic thriller about mermaids, the natural world and ruthless capitalism” isn’t enough to pique your interest, you might be inspired to pick up Lydia Millet’s latest by the title of Laura Miller’s review, which describes Millet as “the P.G. Wodehouse of environmental writing.” At Salon, the book critic goes into the many reasons she enjoys Millet’s work, among them the author’s knack for deploying humor at appropriate times. FYI, Millet wrote an article for The Millions recently.
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Wallace Shawn Interviewed
Wallace Shawn, one of The Millions’ favorite humans, interviewed at Splice Today.
Got Two and a Half Days to Kill?
Hachette Audio has composed a 56-hour long audiobook version of Infinite Jest. In case you’re wondering: no, they don’t read the endnotes; they’re provided as a “bonus PDF.” Also, The Huffington Post gathered two audio excerpts.
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