At Bookforum, Gee Henry talks with New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als, whose new collection of essays, White Girls, tackles subjects including Eminem, Truman Capote and Gone with the Wind. The writer also delves into his affection for André Leon Talley.
One Kind of Coating
The Book of Mormon, on Broadway
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park and Team America World Police, are turning their wild imaginations to a new subject and a new genre: “The Book of Mormon,” a musical the duo co-wrote with Robert Lopez, will open on Broadway next year.
“Inspiration and Obsession”
Recommended reading: Joyce Carol Oates writes about “Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature” for the New York Review of Books.
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Women Write the Apocalypse
How do women write about the apocalypse? Sloane Crosley considers, referencing work from Mary Shelley, P.D. James, Laura van den Berg and our own Emily St. John Mandel. Pair with these Millions interviews with van den Berg and Mandel. Unfortunately, Mary Shelley was unavailable for comment.
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Simone de Beauvoir’s Abandoned Novel Gets a Second Life
Three decades after Simone de Beauvoir's death, her abandoned novel, The Inseparables, will be published, thanks to de Beauvoir’s adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.
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“It tasted like iron and foam was coming out of our mouths”
The VQR‘s last issue, “The Soviet Ghost,” was one of the most heart-wrenching reading experiences I’ve had in a long time. Now it’s got a series of video interviews with Chernobyl workers to seriously depress (and also greatly inform) you all over again.
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That Rare Outlaw
Recommended Reading: Michiko Kakutani on a new biography of Johnny Cash.
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The State of Literature in Translation Today
Chad Post ran the numbers to calculate “the state of literature in translation today,” and in so doing he found that AmazonCrossing has been publishing more works of fiction and poetry in translation than any other press except Dalkey Archive. Additionally, the “overall number of works of fiction in translation being published in the U.S. is growing pretty nicely.” To get a full account of what’s coming out this year, check out his 2013 Translation Database.