What would happen if you anonymously attended a book club about your own novel? Kevin Baker discovered the embarrassing consequences when a meeting on his novel Dreamland turned negative.
Book Club Blunder
Uber Modern Bookstores
The ideal bookstore is hard to pin down. Until recently the consensus seemed to lean towards old, slightly dusty and pleasantly chaotic, but these modern bookstores full of sleek white cases and clean lines have us reconsidering.
●
●
Angie Cruz’s Working Women
Angie Cruz started an Instagram account called Dominicanas NYC to collect photos of 1960s Dominican working-class women while researching her novel Dominicana.
●
●
●
Dispatch from Spain
Over at the Literary Hub, Valerie Miles writes about the life and work of Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes. His forthcoming novel On the Edge is the first of his books to be translated into English and one of the most anticipated books of 2016.
Miami’s Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry
The Miami Herald put together a nice video overview of the Pérez Art Museum’s Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry.
●
●
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Essential Reading
Over at Vulture, twenty-eight authors including Alexander Chee, Margo Jefferson, Colum McCann, and Eileen Myles write about the books that changed their lives. Pair with our article in which six authors reflect on their childhood reading.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day
This week we have new on shelves: Julie Orringer’s hotly anticipated debut novel The Invisible Bridge; Meghan Daum’s memoir of real estate addiction Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, Private Life by Jane Smiley, and The Singer’s Gun by our own Emily St. John Mandel.
●
●
Only once has an author been present at the book group I attend. She did not remain anonymous, and that pretty much destroyed the discussion. All the readers seemed to want to talk about was her “fame” and her “deals” and a little about her writing process. No discussion of the book at all.