Hollywood is romanticizing the Beat Generation in its recent adaptations of On the Road (trailer here), Big Sur (trailer here), and Kill Your Darlings, and you can blame Millennials. “In casting the authors as eternally and fundamentally adolescent, the recent revival tones down their behavior—both revolutionary and repulsive—as a sort of passing teenage phase,” Jordan Larson argues for The Atlantic.
Off Beat
A thrilling history
The history of Ian McEwan’s forthcoming Sweet Tooth.
●
●
Searching for the Female Huck Finn
Where’s the female counterpart to Ishmael or Sal Paradise, Vanessa Veselka asks. “When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends.”
●
●
Marie-Helene Bertino on Manipulating Time in Fiction
In Bertino's latest novel, a bride-to-be struggles with her past, her future, and her dead grandma, who's back as a bird.
●
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Soli; Zambra; Newman; Tyler; Spindler; Hepworth; Lange; Kushner
Out this week: The Last Good Paradise by Tatjana Soli; My Documents by Alejandro Zambra; The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman; A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler; The First Wife by Erica Spindler; The Secrets of Midwives by Sally Hepworth; Sweet Nothing by Richard Lange; and The Strange Case of Rachel K by Millions 2013 Year in Reading favorite Rachel Kushner. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Indie Strong
“Like actual endangered species, independent bookshops induce a fiercely protective kind of love; paradoxically, it’s often their precarity that saves them.” The Guardian profiles Philippe Ungar and Franck Bohbot, the men behind “We Are New York Indie Booksellers,” which features the 50 remaining indies in and around Manhattan. (Pair with: Janet Potter‘s history of bookstore love).
Bookstore Fairy
Recommended Reading: On the mysterious benefactors keeping St. Mark’s bookstore alive.
●
●