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
A Wrinkle in Time to Become a Film
Childhood readers and lovers of A Wrinkle in Time, rejoice! It may finally become a full-length movie, with a screenplay written by Jennifer Lee of Frozen fame.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Buntin; El Akkad; Arimah; Meidav; Watts; Bausch
Out this week: Marlena by Julie Buntin; American War by Omar El Akkad; What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah; Kingdom of the Young by Edie Meidav; No One Is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts; and Living in the Weather of the World by Richard Bausch. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Banks, Sittenfeld, Campbell, Towles
Quarry, The final book of Iain M. Banks, who died this month, is now out. Also out: Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld, On the Floor by Afric Campbell, and, as an "e-single" spin-off to his bestseller Rules of Civility, Amor Towles is out with Eve in Hollywood.
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Translating on a Tether
"There are so many ways to look at translation. One that has recently occurred to me is that of a tether: the translator is tethered to the meaning of the original the way an animal can be tethered to a stake. You can’t take off and roam the hills, but you can definitely move around and experience a comfortable degree of freedom." Asymptote talks with Juliet Winters Carpenter about Japanese tanka poetry, Machi Tawara's Salad Anniversary, and the careful balance of translation.
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On Zines
Peek inside a part of the DIY publishing world: zines. “Before the Internet democratized media, self-publishing was one of few ways for ordinary people to record and share with a wider audience. Zines on old taboos like sexual orientation could provide a staticky connection to a community of others with nonstandard identities in an age before chat rooms and message boards and -- perhaps most importantly -- simple ways to anonymize yourself.”
“The heart belongs to the tide and the deep alone”
The upcoming Supreme Court decision on gay marriage is drawing a lot of attention. But what about the other ruling -- the one aimed at grizzled old men? At The Onion, a report on Justice Alito’s recent decision, which tersely states that marriage is a pact between a man and the sea.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Smith, Hitchens, Straub, Eco, Rothbart, Seidel, Morris, Seals, Eugenides
A big week for books: Zadie Smith's NW is out (read the first lines), as is Christopher Hitchens's Mortality, a collection of essays penned while he fought cancer (our essay on Hitchens' death) (his collection Arguably is out in paperback today). More new books: Emma Straub's Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, Umberto Eco's essay collection Inventing the Enemy, Davy Rothbart's essay collection My Heart Is an Idiot, Frederick Seidel's poetry collection Nice Weather, documentarian Errol Morris's A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, and the Navy Seal book about the bin Laden mission. Also, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides is now out in paperback (read Eugenides on the book's genesis), as is Stephen Greenblatt's Pulitzer winner The Swerve.
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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?