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
The Darkest, Funniest Horse
"As a Pulitzer winner, it’s a unicorn." For the Washington Post, book critic Ron Charles praised the Pulitzer Prize judges for awarding the Fiction prize to Andrew Sean Greer's Less, a comedic, "laugh-till-you-can't-breathe funny" novel. Pair with: our post with all the 2018 Pulitzer winners.
Monday Linkday
The Guardian gives us Booker-winner Line of Beauty "condensed in the style of the original."Some of you may have already seen this one: The 100 Greatest Books of all Time, also from the Guardian. How many have you read? I'm at 24, and I love that Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim makes the list. To anyone who is looking for a recommendation on what to read right now: get Lucky Jim, you'll love it.Weren't we talking about ISBNs the other day? Here's a new blog about ISBNs and "book information" by a former Amazon employee and the creator of isbn.nu.Steve Landsburg asks: Too many books? I'm not completely sure I see his point. He seems to be implying that people only read one book a year. Furthermore, publishers fall all over themselves trying to create a blockbuster book; it's far more cost-effective to promote a few guaranteed big sellers than a lot of risky titles. Sad but true. Perhaps the better thing to do is not to bemoan the inevitable Da Vinci Codes but to instead look for creative, cost-effective ways to promote riskier books.Malcolm Gladwell, author of the trendsetting book about trendsetting, The Tipping Point, has new book coming out called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, in which he "reveals that what we think of as decisions made in the blink of an eye are much more complicated than assumed."
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On Death and Crows
Max Porter's Death Is the Thing With Feathers is a bizarre, beautiful book. Over at The Literary Hub, he talks death, writing, and musical theater with Catherine Lacey. Porter's book came highly recommended by Garth Risk Hallberg in his 2015 Year in Reading for The Millions.
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Librarians on the Front Lines
“There are times it’s happening multiple times a day. Not too long ago, we had two in the same restroom at the same time. We call security, security calls paramedics. Of course they always find somebody lying there.” Samantha Sanders writes for Catapult about the epidemic of opioid overdoses in public libraries, and what some librarians are doing to respond. And ICYMI, here is Corinne Purtill in our own pages about British libraries under austerity cuts.
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New Vessel Press Brings International Literature to the US
New Vessel Press is a new publisher specializing in the translation of foreign literature into the English language. Translator Ross Uffberg and journalist Michael Z. Wise started it last year. Next month, they’ll publish their first book, The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal, and they have plans for quite a few more as well.
Writing Mirrors
"Here is the trouble with looking for ourselves in the writers whose works we admire, at least if we are proposing to be their biographers. For if we are in search of ourselves, or in this case our own troubled teenaged selves roaming New York, then we are apt to downplay those parts of the life that don’t correspond with that need for recognition." Anne Boyd Rioux writes about biography and the distance, good or bad, between subject and biographer for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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?