Looking for more thoughts on My Life in Middlemarch to supplement today’s interview? At Salon, Laura Miller reviews Rebecca Mead’s book, which she calls a “moving demonstration” of Middlemarch’s power. (You could also read Adelle Waldman’s Year in Reading piece about the novel.)
Old Favorites
Cover to Cover
Here at The Millions, we know the importance of a book’s cover (for evidence see here, here, here and here), so Margaret Sullivan‘s new project, Jane Austen Cover to Cover, has our attention. A sample of covers for Emma, available on The Paris Review‘s blog, “provides a fascinating glimpse into a variety of publishing cultures, and it reminds that even our classics are mutable, pitched to appeal to any number of sensibilities, their literary status in constant flux per the dictates of the market.”
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A Slumbering Rooster Begins to Twitch
2010 is soon to be over. That means that The Morning News Tournament of Books is almost upon us. Two excellent developments this year: 1) the folks behind the Rooster have released the longlist of titles under consideration to make the final 16 (including The Singer’s Gun by our own Emily St. John Mandel) and 2) they have left one judging spot open that you (you!) can apply to fill.
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If It Is Fine Tomorrow
This list of the ten best weather events in fiction history includes, among other things, the mud in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and the fraught weather forecast from Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Let’s talk a little bit more about weather with this review from The Millions.
Nabokov: Author, Psychologist, Entomologist
“Did Vladimir Nabokov’s novels anticipate trends in modern psychology?” (via Maud Newton). Well, they certainly anticipated advancements in the evolutionary theory of butterflies.