It may not surprise you to learn that Neil deGrasse Tyson wishes he’d met Oscar Wilde. As part of the By the Book series in the Times, the astronomer talks about his favorite writers, including Carl Sagan, Bill Bryson and Jonathan Swift.
On Dr. Seuss and Pluto, Etc.
O Detroit
You may have heard that our own Bill Morris has a new book on shelves. He talked about it with fellow Millions staff writer and California author Edan Lepucki. At the LARB, Diana Clarke reviews the book, which she calls “a sharp critique of the contemporary American post-racial narrative,” among other things.
Let’s Find a Way to Make this Debate Happen
The London Review of Books made Jenny Diski watch and review Downton Abbey. Let’s just say she and our own Garth Risk Hallberg could probably have a nice debate about it.
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The litigation is never dead. It’s not even past.
Last Thursday, Faulkner Literary Rights, the company controlling William Faulkner’s works, proved two things by suing Sony Pictures Classics: 1) that they finally got around to seeing Midnight In Paris (2011); and 2) that they’re not down with Woody Allen’s decision to include two of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s lines in Owen Wilson’s dialogue.
How Should an Interview Be?
My Millions social media teammate Emily M. Keeler is probably too humble to write a Curiosity about her kickass interview with Sheila Heti. But not I, dear readers! Not I.
Alice Munro’s First Book
“I didn’t really understand what reading was for. If I wanted a story, the thing to do was to get my grandmother to read it to me. Then listening to her voice, her story-reading voice which always sounded a little incredulous, marvelling, yet full of faith, bravely insistent, and watching her face, its meaningful and utterly familiar expressions—lifted eyebrows, ominously sinking chin, brisk little nods of agreement when, as sometimes happened, a character said something sensible—then I would feel the story grow into life and exist by itself, so that it hardly seemed to me that she was reading it out of a book at all; it was something she had created herself, out of thin air… But one summer I had the whooping-cough, and afterwards I could not go swimming or jump off the beams in the barn or boss my little brother, because by that time he had the whooping-cough himself. My grandmother was off somewhere, visiting other cousins. So I swung on my swing until I got dizzy, and then for no reason in particular I took the Child’s History out of the bookcase in the front room, and sat down on the floor and started to read.” Alice Munro writes about A Child’s History of England, the first book she ever read.
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PW’s Top 10 of 2009
Publisher’s Weekly has released a Top 10 adult books list for 2009, fiction and non-fiction. Click here for the (perhaps surprising) list, including reviews.
Seeing Beyond the Story
“When she began the cancer memoir, it was the fact of the writing, more than what was to be written, that mattered.” On Jenny Diski’s way of seeing beyond the story.
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