When it comes to the pleasures of reading out loud, Michael Robbins isn’t so much interested in “why we find certain sounds in certain combinations pleasing or disturbing,” but he does enjoy “the hows.”
You Should Have This Title Read to You
An Interview with Justin Taylor
Writers who know literature: Bookslut’s Mark Doten talks Kierkegaard, Derrida, Bataille, Sinclair and Faulkner with Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever author Justin Taylor.
For Your Weekend
Slate offers up a treatise on “the greatness of gin.” (via my friend Derek, who wrote: “for your book blog; there is too little booze on it”)
New Katherine Mansfield Story Found
While thumbing through the archives at King’s College, a graduate student uncovered four previously unknown stories by Katherine Mansfield.
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DFW Roundup
From the person who brought you Infinite Boston comes Infinite Atlas, an interactive map of the places that make up Infinite Jest, and, for the truely devoted, the Infinite Map, a framable print version of that atlas. Page-Turner offers an extended preview of D.T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. Maria Popova highlights a few of the signature DFW words that he adopted from his mother.
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B&N or Bust
We need Barnes & Noble. Alex Shephard writes on the role of the retailer for publishers and readers. You could also check out our series on the Future of the Book.
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“Speaking of Memory”
In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Peter Birkenhead goes back to Nabokov‘s Speak, Memory and considers “the way our memories tell themselves to us: in hints, collisions, and rushes, overlapping, upside down, out of order.” Pair with our own Garth Risk Hallberg‘s piece on reading Ada, or Ardor.
Modern Canterbury Tales
If Chaucer lived today, The Canterbury Tales might look a little bit like this.
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Peter Matthiessen to Publish New Novel
Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen will publish a new novel in the spring of next year. Matthiessen, who won the National Book Award in 2008 for his last novel, Shadow Country, said the new novel centers on “a weeklong meditation retreat at the site of a World War II concentration camp.”
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