Recommended Reading: People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry’s stunning essay on Reverend Kaneda, a Japanese monk performing exorcisms to solve his region’s “ghost problem.”
“In such circumstances, how could there fail to be a swarm of ghosts?”
Tuesday New Release Day: Tosches, Saramago, Maurois, Buarque, Light
Out today are Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches; Raised from the Ground by Jose Saramago; Climates, a newly translated novel from 1928 by French writer Andre Maurois; Spilt Milk by Brazilian writer Chico Buarque; and Alan Light’s The Holy or the Broken about a Leonard Cohen song that Jeff Buckley made famous.
Dead Ends
Recommended Reading: Enrique Vila-Matas on rock ‘n’ roll, anti-artists, and the central motor of his work.
Jennifer Egan at 15
Maybe the real reason I like Jennifer Egan is that there are so many freckled protagonists in her books. Patricia Zohn at the Huffington Post asks the author about her family, parenting, and her writing obsessions (like freckled faces). She even gets a photo of Egan as a teenager!
Mieko Kawakami on Her Favorite Murakami Story
Kriegman Explains It All
This Splitsider interview with Clarissa Explains It All creator Mitchell Kriegman is fantastic. Among the many revelations that come out of the interview is this gem: “The most amazing person that you would never guess worked on the show was [The Hunger Games author] Suzanne Collins. She was the quietest, nicest person. Like having JK Rowling working on your show!”