Dispirited by the deluge of advance review copies and publishing mailers (a plight to which I can relate), Ron Charles decided to forego traditional book criticism for the time being and instead to focus on reviewing something more immediately practical: a bookcase.
Book(case) Criticism
Film Critics, A Dying Breed
The new media revolution has massacred the book review sections at many national newspapers, but it’s been just as unkind to movie reviewers. At his Salt Lake Tribune blog, Movie Cricket, SLT film critic Sean P. Means keeps a list of all of the movie reviewers who’ve gotten the axe.
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The Full Stop Book Club
Hot new online magazine Full Stop has chosen The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books as its inaugural book club selection. The discussion will be happening all this week.
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The Great Millenial Novelist
Madeleine Schwartz examines the works of Sally Rooney, who was recently crowned "the great millennial novelist," by many critics.
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Goodbye, Gourmet
If the idea of Rachael Ray as queen of the food world shivers your timbers, read no further: Gourmet magazine, until now stewarded by the excellent Ruth Reichl, will cease publication with the November issue, the NY Times reports. Condé Nast also gave the axe to Cookie, Elegant Bride, and Modern Bride. The print media mass grave fills apace…
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Epic Fail
When did Samuel Beckett’s “fail better” become the motto of Silicon Valley? At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell traces the history of the phrase. “Fail Better, with its TEDishly counterintuitive feel, is the literary takeaway par excellence; it’s usefully suggestive, too, of the corporate propaganda of productivity, with its appeals to ‘think different’ or ‘work smarter’ or ‘just do it.'”
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Lerner on Berger
Recommended Listening: Ben Lerner stops by The New Yorker’s fiction podcast to discuss “Woven, Sir,” a story by John Berger.
Fractal Surfaces
Recommended Reading: On Marianne Moore’s infectious devotion to all things small, and how that same devotion helped make her Observations one of the great verbal works of art of the 20th century.
150 New Mark Twains
Just found: 150 new Mark Twain stories, written when the author was a young newspaperman in San Francisco.
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