Take A Hike

From Ian McEwan to Iris Murdoch, The Guardian offers a list of the 10 best seaside novels. Pair with our own Mark O’Connell‘s account of a close encounter with John Banville, whose The Sea makes the #8 spot.

Kaya Genç, who’s previously written for us about Orhan Pamuk, has a new article out in Guernica about deceased filmmaker Seyfi Teoman, “whose two feature films,” he writes, “drove Turkish film for two decades.”

Last week, I wrote about Caleb Crain’s entry in By Heart, a series at The Atlantic in which prominent writers talk about their favorite passages. Now, & Sons author David Gilbert talks about Moby Dick, which he says is “one of a few books [he’s] dreamed about.”

I’d heard that the New Yorker excerpt was the opening of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom, but it turns out it is preceded in the novel by this: “The news about Walter Berglund wasn’t picked up locally–he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now–but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times. According to a long and very unflattering story in the Times, Walter had made quite a mess of his professional life out there in Washington. His old neighbors had some difficulty reconciling the quotes about him in the Times (‘arrogant,’ ‘high-handed,’ ‘ethically compromised’) with the generous, smiling, red-faced 3M employee they remembered pedaling his commuter bicycle up Summit Avenue in February snow; it seemed strange that Walter, who was greener than Greenpeace and whose own roots were rural, should be in trouble now for conniving with the coal industry and mistreating country people. Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.”