Recommended Reading: Roger Angell describes life in the nineties. His nineties.
“Here’s to you, old dears. You got this right, every one of you.”
Love-Love
Why not follow in the footsteps of writers such as David Foster Wallace and play some tennis?
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May the odds be ever in your favor, Suzanne Collins.
The Hunger Games raked in $155 million in its opening weekend. That makes it the highest-grossing non-sequel debut of all time. Over at Salon, Laura Miller tracks the steps that led to the blockbuster's mammoth success.
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Hedges’ The Heights
Peter Hedges, author of the novel and screenplay for What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, as well as Dan in Real Life, and Pieces of April, is set to adapt and direct his latest novel, The Heights. Set in Brooklyn Heights amid its wealthy, over-zealous, stay-at-home mommy set, the novel follows a happy, slightly down-at-the-heel couple as their marriage is tested by the arrival of another woman. (All of the wit of Tom Perrotta's Little Children, but not quite so dark and cynical.)
Dispatch from South Asia
The summer issue of 91st Meridian is out, featuring new translations from Hindi, Bangla, Urdu, Tamil, Punjabi and Malayalam. For more literature in translation, check out with this Millions essay about translators at work.
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Boycotting Indies?
We are now over a week into Amazon's boycott of the indie press e-books distributed under the Independent Publishers Group. IPG is taking a stand against Amazon's hardline negotiations during the retail giant's annual contract review, and 5000 titles are no longer available through the Kindle store. Last week Jim Hanas, author of the digitally and independently published Why They Cried, spoke out against Amazon to champion other e-readers and e-book retailers. The renegotiations are taking place across the industry, though, as Melville House's Dennis Johnson puts it, "major industry figures at the big houses in New York — facing similar cutthroat demands from Amazon for their own annual contracts — remain silent... This isn't over yet."
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And then I was like “Alas!”
For everyone who harbors a deep and mildly-embarrassed love for GIFs in the significant, non-linguistic part of their brains that finds repeated facial expressions far more memorable than words: Ploughshares' series on classic novels (1984, The Catcher in the Rye, The Scarlet Letter, The Hobbit) will have you laughing and building your cocktail-party knowledge all at once.
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