“A story works when there’s momentum, life behind the words,” Mary Miller told Matthew Salesses at The Rumpus. She needs that momentum for her new novel, The Last Days of California, about a family driving to California for the rapture. Also, Amy Butcher wrote about her favorite Millerisms at Hobart.
Keeping the Pace
Weird: France & Belgium
Recommended recommendations: Weird Fiction Review has compiled a list of notable “weird” French and Belgian writers.
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The Great American Novelist
“And that might be the best way to understand Erdrich’s artistic project: as a celebration of beauty and a testament to the redemptive power of art — which, of course, includes storytelling.” Rumaan Alam interviews Louise Erdrich about her illustrious writing career for Buzzfeed Reader. Erdrich’s newest novel Future Home of the Living God was featured in our November Preview.
Hits and Misses
“You’d be hard-pressed to find a book that was at once so bold in style and ambitious in structure and so much fun to read.” The Guardian asks indie publishers about the books that made their year, including Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue (whose own Year in Reading you can find here).
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There Once Was a Girl from Secaucus
“Who cares if I really hate sports
And for work, he writes ‘baseball reports’?
It’s only one date
I mean, this could be fate!
Nope, nevermind, he’s the worst.”
Limericks for lost online dates.
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Brief Likenesses
“Armand’s characters all seem both hugely present and in life’s juice and simultaneously dead, as if rent of brain, nerves, chest, stomach, intestines … Without gods and devils these patients feel that only fire can save them, existing eternally unless burned away.” Australian novelist Louis Armand’s newest, Abacus, is reviewed by Richard Marshall at 3:AM Magazine.
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The Road on Which You Are Traveling Is a Very Bad Road
New York Times travel editor Monica Drake recounts visiting Antigua after reading Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place—a sharp critique of tourism and the colonialist narrative around the island. As she puts it, “For all the drama of its history, […] the beauty of the place, the very thing that bewitches its tourists, renders it a time capsule to its residents.”
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