Big news: It looks like Haruki Murakami’s much-anticipated new novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage finally has a U.S. publication date: August 12, 2014.
New Murakami Coming in August
I Know I Would
It’s almost December. Wouldn’t you rather be surfing in Fiji?
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It’s Okay, I Guess
If your default mood hovers between melancholy and despair, you may be cheered (or at least made a bit less glum) by this argument that striving for happiness is bad for us in the long run. Mari Ruti makes the case that a “happy, balanced life” depends in large part on a kind of emotional numbness.
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To Paraphrase Potter Stewart
“The more you take, the more you have to give back — the better the work has to be.” The New York Times features Year in Reading alum Rivka Galchen in dialogue with Anna Holmes (“You can’t always prove appropriation, but you usually know it when you see it”) on the distinction between artistic license and cultural theft. Pair with our review of Galchen’s Little Labors.
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Curiosities
Esquire offers up a terrific time sink, “The 7 Greatest Stories in the History of Esquire Magazine.” Included among these gems of long-form journalism, which are all reprinted in full, is Richard Ben Cramer’s “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” which appeared on the list of best sports journalism we ran last month.Not long ago, we discussed the books that first stoked our love for reading. The Guardian takes it one step further, asking “What were your favourite books before you could read?“A brief YouTube profile of Annette Gordon-Reed, National Book Award winner for The Hemingses of Monticello.From The Morning News, a slightly insane, moderately epic profile of Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir.Also from The Morning News, a bit about The Chicagoan, the long-lost New Yorker-esque magazine for the Second City, now memorialized in coffee-table book form. If ever any cities (besides New York of course) could be granted New Yorker-like magazines, Chicago and Los Angeles would be deserving. BoingBoing points to some pdf excerpts of the book.Poll watching savant Nate Silver takes execrable rabble-rouser John Ziegler to task for a dubious survey of Obama supporters. Petulance ensues.
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“Writers have always been whiners.”
With just a few more weeks to go until the end of the world, here’s an argument for the golden age of writing – right now.
Kate Zambreno and the Art of Protecting Yourself as a Writer
Kate Zambreno examines the path that led her to write her recent book, as well as the importance of guarding one's time as a writer.
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