Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is almost as famous for being sampled on Beyoncé’s latest album as she is for her novel Americanah. With that in mind, she discussed her writing process, hair blogs, and what feminism means to her in Elle. “It means that I am present in the world, and that I realize that there is a problem with the way we’ve constructed gender,” she said. For more Adichie, read her 2013 Year in Reading post.
Feminist Fiction
High Book Marks
Lit Hub has created a Rotten Tomatoes for the literary world. Once a book receives three reviews, it is assigned a score on their new site, Book Marks. Alex Shephard asks if we might have a grade inflation problem.
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High Praise for Rebecca Solnit
In a new issue of N1BR, Nikil Saval takes a look at Rebecca Solnit‘s latest, calling its predecessor River of Shadows “surely one of the best books of the past decade.”
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Pevear and Volokhonsky on Leskov
Granta talks to some translators of Russian literature about what they’re working on, and we learn that Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the first couple of Russian translation are working on a 600-page collection of stories by Nikolai Leskov, an underappreciated contemporary of Dostoevsky. Previously: The Millions interviews P&V.
Wednesday Links: Honorary Awards; Scottish Flood; Book Sale
Joan Didion and NPR uber-interviewer Terry Gross will be honored at the National Book Awards ceremony in November. Dideon won a National Book Award in 2005 for her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking.The National Library of Scotland flooded yesterday thanks to a faulty sprinkler system. It was a close call: “Some modern books and manuscripts suffered ‘surface’ water damage, but all of the ‘important, iconic’ books were saved.”Oops! A church in England sold some rare tomes for modest though still substantial sum to a book dealer, only to find, too late, that they are worth much, much more.
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Joshua Cohen’s Epic
Joshua Cohen, author of the just-published meganovel Witz, dispenses provocations in The New York Observer: “The targets might be Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shalom Auslander… When I started this book, I wanted to sleep with their wives. By the time I finished, I wanted to sleep with their mothers.”
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Only Sounds
“The most, the best, we can do, we believe (wanting to give evidence of love), is to get out of the way, leave space around whomever or whatever it is.” This excerpt from John Cage’s journals, forthcoming as Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse), is as baffling as it is beautiful.
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