If for some unspeakable reason you didn’t follow my advice when I urged you to subscribe to the VQR over a year ago, then perhaps you need more convincing. Enter: Ron Charles. He’s got a brief preview of the magazine’s Winter Issue, which hit shelves this week, and which contains an essay based on Natasha Trethewey’s Library of Congress speech.
The VQR’s Winter Issue Is Here
Crossed Lines
In the latest issue of the LRB, Jenny Diski comes to the defense of Liz Jones, a Daily Mail columnist and spiritual sibling to the far-too-beautiful-to-live Samantha Brick. Her takeaway after reading a column that got Jones into hot water? Diski “couldn’t see” what the pilloried writer had done wrong.
●
●
Conquest of Panic
Irving Howe asks how Hemingway commanded the attention of a generation. Howe writes, “His great subject, I think, was panic.” Our own Michael Bourne recently answered this question, recognizing Hemingway as a middlebrow revolutionary.
●
●
LA Review of Self-Published Books
The Los Angeles Review will start reviewing one self-published book each month. They plan on applying “the same standards of good literature” to their reviews of self-published content as they do to traditionally published content.
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)
Youth Movement
A somewhat startling headline: “Amelia Lester, 26 Year Old Former Fact Checker, is the New Managing Editor of The New Yorker.” Another interesting tidbit: The New Yorker has been exempt from meeting with the consultants who are currently scrutinizing the rest of Conde Nast’s titles.
Tuesday New Release Day: Wilson; Ackerman; Barry; Barkan; Krivak; Coe
Out this week: Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson; Dark at the Crossing by Eliot Ackerman; Days Without End by Sebastian Barry; Mexico by Josh Barkan; The Signal Flame by Andrew Krivak; and Number 11 by Jonathan Coe. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
●
●