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
Memories of Home
For NPR, Joyce Carol Oates talks about her childhood home and how it’s influenced her as a person and a writer. Pair with Brittani Sonnenberg’s Millions essay on finding a home as a writer.
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Notebook on Cities and Words
"We believe in the digital with abandon. So when something of artisanal quality is placed in our hands, or we see something hanging on a wall drawn by an actual hand, we feel a little shock. We remember how to feel something. Maybe not quite an emotion, but the touch of paper does something to us. We use our senses again." Celebrating fifty years of the French publisher L’école des Loisirs, Gnaomi Siemens reflects on the power of hand-drawn images and the future of the book.
First Winners of the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Fiction and Nonfiction Announced
This past Sunday the American Library Association gave out the first Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction to Robert K. Massie’s Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman and Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz. Also be sure to check out our interview with Enright.
“In such circumstances, how could there fail to be a swarm of ghosts?”
Recommended Reading: People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry’s stunning essay on Reverend Kaneda, a Japanese monk performing exorcisms to solve his region’s “ghost problem.”
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Elgin Marbles Return Home?
British Members of Parliament have proposed a bill to return the Elgin Marbles (of Keats fame) to Greece.
Dear Matthew Specktor
Thanks to Stephen Elliot's Letters in the Mail project, LARB senior editor Matthew Specktor finds himself admiring the gorgeous handwriting of strangers, feeling tickled and gobsmacked, and reflecting on letter writing as something "beautifully useless to do."
Vanishing Point’s Editorial Fellowship
Vanishing Point, which I’ve praised in the past, is offering an editorial fellowship in digital documentary publishing, and it’s open to people who live near Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, as well as to those who live far away.
Into Thin Air
Most readers have their own idiosyncratic systems for displaying the most valuable titles they own. For a lot of people, it makes the most sense to keep their favorite books on a particular shelf. At The Paris Review Daily, Sadie Stein writes about an odd phenomenon -- “The Phantom Shelf,” which consists of books you love so much you had to lend them to friends. (Related: Kevin Hartnett on reading our parents’ bookshelves.)
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