“Audiobooks Read By You: Just like reading a book without actually reading a book, by reading a book and recording it in a studio.”
“I don’t remember any of these pages.”
Meg Wolitzer YA
Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings has been a Millions favorite, so we’re excited to hear about her next book, Belzhar, a young adult novel inspired by Sylvia Plath. The book comes out on September 30 and follows a 16-year-old grieving at a boarding school for fragile teenagers, where she and her classmates discover an alternate world. Wolitzer spoke to NPR about why she was drawn to YA. “Much of what adolescents feel seems set in relief, and much of what they experience is happening to them for the first time.”
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Finnegans What, Now?
I hope you had your Wheaties this morning, because this one is a doozy. Scientists at Poland’s Institute of Nuclear Physics have discovered complex “fractal” sentence patterning in classic works of literature that is nearly identical to “ideal” mathematics. Maybe Finnegans Wake does make sense, after all.
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The Brief Wondrous Influences of Junot Díaz
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao author Junot Díaz lists the movies, TV shows and books that most influenced him at Vulture.
Owning It
“What I want to argue is that we in contemporary English and literature departments need to think instead about how to keep doing abstraction, but better—how can we ‘own’ it, as my students might say, rather than wish it away.” Jeanne-Marie Jackson writes at 3:AM Magazine about comparative literature, the public, and politics.
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False Positive
At The New Yorker, Sarah Miller humorously learns why only positive book reviews might be a bad thing. “If St. Petersburg is the Little Engine That Could of city names, then the main character, Raskolnikov, is the Little Engine That Could of elderly pawnbroker murderers,” she writes in her review of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.