Now that Horse_ebooks as we knew it is dead (or alive, depending on your viewpoint), the Internet is convening to pay tribute to the Dadaist masterpiece. At Slate, Will Oremus opines that the feed was “pretty great” even when it was a spambot, while at The Globe and Mail, Navneen Alang argues that it’s “more wonderful today, not less.”
And Are We and Are We
The Art of Fiction with Imre Kertész
The Paris Review’s interview with Hungarian author (and recent retiree) Imre Kertész is up on their website now, and to celebrate the occasion the magazine is offering a $10 discount on subscriptions. The promo code is good all week long.
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Evelyn Waugh’s Brother Invented the Cocktail Party
“Unable to replicate the success of his first novel [The Loom of Youth],” writes Philip Quarles, “[Alec Waugh] did create a lasting impact by being credited with inventing the cocktail party when he shocked guests by serving, instead of afternoon tea, rum swizzles.”
Lambda Literary Award Names 2019 Finalists
Whittled down from a pool of 1,000 submissions, the finalists for the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards—which highlight and celebrate LBGTQ literature—include Akwaeke Emezi, Joseph Cassara, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Patrick Nathan, and Jordy Rosenberg.
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Berlin Stories, Redux
“Home is the place where there is someone who does not wish you any pain.” Stop what you’re doing and go read this interview with Darryl Pinckney, author of Black Deutschland, over at The Rumpus. Here’s a great Millions essay on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which serves as a sort of (misguided) guide map for the protagonist of Black Deutschland.
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Tuesday New Release Day
The latest effort from superstar translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is now on shelves. P & V’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories is in our Hall of Fame, and we interviewed the couple last year. Also out: Mark Twain’s long-embargoed Autobiography is now shipping; V.S. Naipaul’s The Masque of Africa; X’ed Out by graphic novel master Charles Burns; Avi Steinburg’s literary memoir Running the Books: Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian; and the odd literary project that is James Franco has a new collection out, Palo Alto
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