Middlesex author and Pulitzer Prize winner (and Year in Reading alum) Jeffrey Eugenides has a new story out in this week’s issue of The New Yorker. Titled “Find the Bad Guy,” it may well be the first New Yorker story to show a character playing Words with Friends. Sample quote: “She had her arms around me, and we were rocking, real soft-like, the way Meg did after we gave her that kitten, before it died, I mean, when it was just a warm and cuddly thing instead of like it had hoof and mouth, and went south on us.”
Find the Long Word
Septuagenarian Akutagawa Prize Winner
Paging Sonya Chung and the rest of the Bloom gang: one of this year’s Akutagawa Prize winners is a seventy-five year old woman named Natsuko Kuroda. How’s that for a Post-40 Bloomer? (h/t Dustin Kurtz)
Meg Wolitzer Goes Hollywood (Again)
Meg Wolitzer details the odd experience of seeing her characters brought to life on the screen in The New York Times.
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Dudley’s World
I’ve always wanted to read Dudley’s World. And by “always” I obviously mean ever since I first saw The Royal Tenenbaums. Criterion’s got a slideshow of all of the film’s fictional titles.
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The Year of the Essay
“Reading fiction is one of my true loves, but essays help me to understand things about the world, the writer, and if they’re really great, myself.” Electric Literature‘s Jason Diamond argues 2014 was “The Year of the Essay,” and when we think over the collections published this year – The Empathy Exams, The Unspeakable and Loitering, among others – it’s hard to disagree.
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Stein Squared: Object Lessons
Paris Review editor Lorin Stein was interviewed for Days of Yore. Topics include: the “perverse power” of editing your parents’ work; his rise through the ranks of NYC publishing; and the new story collection, Object Lessons. Elsewhere you can check out his “five favorite short story collections.” And, in case you missed it, be sure to check out our own Bill Morris’s interview with Paris Review deputy editor Sadie Stein (no relation) about the Object Lessons collection as well.
Untranslated But Not Unloved
Granta highlights their favorite untranslated writers.
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Words on the street.
Ian Crouch on the place of real estate in the novel, and its tenedency to “reinforce our modern sense that the appearance of our houses, and the taste and class that they represent, are among the defining elements of modern selfhood.”
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