Recommended Reading: Charles Simic’s ode to Summertime. (Trust me, you’ll need this. It’s brutal outside and we need to remember why we even bother with it.)
“What kind of birdie are you?”
Salman Rushdie on George Orwell
Granta posts Salman Rushdie’s 1984 essay ‘Outside the Whale’ – a response to an essay by George Orwell about the political role of the artist: “If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history’s great and most abject abdications.”
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Reviews for the King
Some reviews of Dave Eggers’s new novel, Hologram for the King, are starting to appear: Carolyn Kellogg writes that the story is accessibly though “elegantly told,” and Michiko Kakutani describes the prose as almost surprisingly “pared down” and “Hemingwayesque.”
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Yea or Nay
In the mid-90s, David Foster Wallace published a scathing review of a John Updike novel, Toward the End of Time, that became a key text for critics of the celebrated author. Now, at The New Republic, David Baddiel argues that Updike gets a bad rap, while Jeffrey Meyers backs up DFW’s position. It might also be a good time to read James Santel’s review of Updike’s Collected Stories.
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The Morning News Tournament of Books
Emma Straub declares Julian Barnes‘s Sense of an Ending fitter than Donald Ray Pollock‘s The Devil All the Time in the opening round of The Morning News Tournament of Books.
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Lichtenstein’s Art Comes Full Circle
Full Stop editor Anna-Claire Stinebring argues that Roy Lichtenstein’s art has “come full circle” thanks, at least in part, to the popularity of Mad Men and 1960s nostalgia. Matt Weiner’s drama, after all, “explores but also glamorizes the world that produced the material for Lichtenstein’s most famous paintings.”
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Donald J. Sobol Passed Away
Donald J. Sobol, author of the Encyclopedia Brown series, passed away last week at age 87.
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Victor LaValle’s Exceptional Latest
Year in Reading alum Victor LaValle’s just-released novel The Devil in Silver was shouted out in our first Great 2012 Book Preview, and Nathan Huffstutter says it’s “exceptional.”
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