All Apologies

Recommended Listening: David Naimon interviews Year in Reading alumnus Jesse Ball about his latest book, How to Set a Fire and Why—one of the most anticipated books of 2016.

“Wallace’s fiction contains enormous cruelty… But it is also a deeply moral body of work. Its difficulties, and many of its cruelties, exist for specific reasons. Whether Wallace’s fraught projects are successes or failures is up to the individual, but these are judgments that all serious readers should want to make for themselves.” Chris Power considers David Foster Wallace‘s short stories in an essay for The Guardian and argues that after Infinite Jest they just might be the most important work he produced.

Two hotly anticipate works by literary masters hit shelves this week. Both were “most anticipated books.” We have The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood and Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro. The latter was written about persuasively by Lydia in recent weeks.

It may comfort you to know that Susan Orlean claims to have “a sad dependence” on her iPhone. The New Yorker staff writer, who published an article (paywall) on the Twitter account Horse_ebooks this week, tells Bobby Finger that she had to buy a new battery case because she ran through the charge on her phone by the middle of the day.

“[Maria] Bamford’s newest show…is a more polished product, but equally radical—as unsettling as anything Andy Kaufman ever did.” Is the Internet the comedy world’s final frontier?

What can you do for free these days? Well, for one thing, you can apply to The Kenyon Review’s 2013 Short Fiction Contest. The deadline is February 28th.

Looks like George Orwell’s birthplace is going to be turned into a memorial – but to a different writer and activist. The land will be dedicated to Gandhi, who Orwell wrote about in his 1949 essay “Reflections on Gandhi.”