Out this week: Andrew’s Brain by E.L. Doctorow; Perfect by Rachel Joyce; A Highly Unlikely Scenario by Rachel Cantor; Selected Letters of Robert Creeley; The Visionist by Rachel Urquhart; and new paperback editions of Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Kurt Vonnegut’s Letters and Year in Reading favorite Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers.
Tuesday New Release Day: Doctorow; Joyce; Cantor; Creeley; Urquhart; Russell; Vonnegut; Kushner
“You were trapped to begin with”
“The Being and Nothingness Network: Social Media for Existentialists.”
More links: numbers, Quills, Potter’s defeat, Godzilla
Great posts over at Sarah’s blog and at M.J. Rose’s about where books sell the most copies (think Wal Mart) and why Amazon rankings don’t mean much in the way of book sales. (via Tingle Alley)They’ve announced the nominees for the Quills Awards – an attempt to build a book-focused version of the typical, bloated TV awards show. The nominees seem to be stale mix of award-winners and nominees (NBA, Pulitzer, etc.) from the last 18 months and middlebrow bestsellers that aren’t particularily literary, but aren’t outright trash either. Will anybody watch this? I mean, I like books, but yawn.For the last two weeks, Harry Potter #6 has “been the top-seller in every single one of The Book Standard’s 99 local-area charts. But this week, a glimmer of hope appeared for other authors, as The Book Standard charts registered a change – one single change.” How a “conservative talk-radio personality” unseated Harry Potter in the Bristol-Kingsport-Johnson City, Tennessee, area.Godzilla pauses for a moment before his rampage. Click it. It’s funny.
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Nine Poetries
Need some more poetry in your life? Catch up on the year’s best collections. At Page-Turner, Dan Chiasson chooses nine books he predicts will be read in a hundred years, including Corridor by Saskia Hamilton and Go Giants by Nick Laird. FYI, I wrote a Curiosity about one of Chiasson’s picks.
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Fear in Christian America
Recommended Reading: Marilynne Robinson on the functions of fear and Christianity in America in The New York Review of Books. You could also check out Alex Engebretson’s essay comparing Robinson’s Housekeeping to the Gilead novels.
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Self-Absorption
A few days ago, our own Kaulie Lewis pointed readers to a LARB essay about Geoff Dyer, which nicely complemented a piece about the author our own Mark O’Connell wrote for Slate back in June. Now, at Full-Stop, David Burr Gerard suggests that Dyer’s strengths, which worked so well in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, may have hampered him in Another Great Day at Sea. FYI, our own Janet Potter reviewed the latter book for The Millions.
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The Broken Novel
Literary fiction is falling apart, but it might be for the best, Ted Gioia writes. In his essay, he explores the history of the fragmented novel (or the polyphonic novel as we’ve written about before) from Winesburg, Ohio to A Visit From the Goon Squad and fittingly, he does it in fragments.
History Lesson – Part II
Who would have predicted, when an unassuming history of post-punk called Our Band Could Be Your Life was published in 2001, that we’d be celebrating its tenth anniversary with concert blowouts and Paris Review Daily interviews? Most anyone who read it, that’s who.