At the Fiction Writers Review, Robin Black sits down with contributor and Year in Reading alumna Nichole Bernier. The two discuss, among other things, Bernier’s new novel, The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D., as well as novels in which lengthy sections feature characters reading journal entries. (Bernier calls them “funhouse mirrors.”)
Unfinished Work
Monday Links
The New Yorker lovefest continues: Emdashes is compiling a list of the New Yorker articles that have appeared in Houghton Mifflin's annual Best American Essays series. It's a perfect guide for dipping into your Complete New Yorker set. Update: Emdashes has also done a "short stories" version of the list.My cousin Mitch produces a survey of state quarters. Arkansas: thumbs down. Connecticut: thumbs up!The Regret the Error blog (which tracks all sorts of funny newspaper corrections) has produced a book with a serious sounding subtitle.I would love to get my hands on Transit Maps of the World, an encyclopedic book that's already been noted by Boing Boing and kottke.
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Graph Lit
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The Best Book for Every State
This week in book-related internet graphics: "A Map of the Best Book for Every State," complete with the promise that "every last one will let you understand a time and place in a more profound way than you maybe thought possible."
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Book Five: Still Strugglin’
Recommended (Long) Reading: This lengthy excerpt from the latest book in Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series. In it, Knausgaard is introduced to the literary world and stresses a great deal over his own claims to artistic merit: "Deep down, I was decent and proper, a goody-goody, and, I thought, perhaps that was also why I couldn’t write. I wasn’t wild enough, not artistic enough, in short, much too normal for my writing to take off. What had made me believe anything else? Oh, but this was the life-lie."
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Indie Bound
Naysayers, consider this: in the digital era, the brick-and-mortar bookstore might be experiencing a resurgence.
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Marco Roth on Kazuo Ishiguro
In honor of the upcoming film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, n+1 posts Marco Roth’s compelling review of Ishiguro’s novel and Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island online for the first time.
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