Recommended Reading: Nicole Krauss’s new short story, “I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake,” at The New Republic. “My mother had died when I was three. We had already dealt with death, in our way we’d agreed to be finished with it. Then, without warning, my father broke our agreement.”
Fatherless Fiction
Thees and Thous
Recommended reading: a new, previously undiscovered story and accompanying poem by Charlotte Brontë. The story is rife with flogging and embezzlement–all the good stuff! Here’s a bonus piece on how Charlotte is at least partly responsible for the success of the Bronte sisters as a whole.
He’s the Ragtime King / There is None Higher…
Ta-Nehisi Coates calls Doctorow sire (in his post E.L. Doctorow – Badass M.C.) Back in grad school, we just called him “The Funk Doc.”
●
●
Curiosities
A “blogbook” on the financial crisis. The table of contents.Essential Bolaño: The Five Most Unskippable Passages in 266650 years worth of Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” is now online for free all the way back to that very first strip. (via)
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Wray; Tennant-Moore; Wink; Sorrentino; de Kerangal; Gustine; Barbery; Silva; Warlick; Enrigue; Amdahl
Out this week: The Lost Time Accidents by John Wray; Wreck and Order by Hannah Tennant-Moore; Dog Run Moon by Callan Wink; The Fugitives by Christopher Sorrentino; The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal; You Should Pity Us Instead by Amy Gustine; The Life of Elves by Muriel Barbery; Square Wave by Mark de Silva; The Arrangement by Ashley Warlick; Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue; and The Daredevils by Gary Amdahl. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
●
●
2 comments:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Written History
The New Republic takes a look at Adrienne Rich’s never-before-seen letters, which trace her feminist awakening.
Instapoetry Month
We’re in the thick of National Poetry Month now, and Tweetspeak has a full round-up of ways to participate online. In particular, I think the Virginia Quarterly Review’s “Instapoem” series is especially rad. (Gee, I wonder why.)
●
●
New Releases: Marias, Jansson
The new book release schedule is slow in December, but the third book in Javier Marías’ acclaimed Your Face Tomorrow trilogy is now out, Poison, Shadow, and Farewell. Also, new on shelves is The True Deceiver, a 1982 novel by the Finnish writer Tove Jansson from NYRB Classics.
●
●
Readers Pick Favorite Indie Books
More from The Huffington Post’s series on independent books: Readers’ Favorites From Indie Publishers.
●
●
This caught me off guard. The New Republic publishes fiction now? But now it makes sense: Krauss is the editor’s sister-in-law. This so perfectly represents the insularity and cronyism in American fiction these days. You just can’t make this stuff up.
Serious question: what about this story (and Krauss in general) led you to recommend it? It’s so unoriginal and insipid that I just can’t for the life of me understand why this piece, out of hundreds that are published every day, stands out. How would you define Krauss’ style? What sets her apart from other writers? What makes this story different than the “person dealing with a parent’s death” stories that are churned out daily in undergraduate workshops?
^^You realize you’re talking to an aggregator bot right?