This week, our own Lydia Kiesling took part in The Morning News Tournament of Books, where she adjudicated a showdown between Scott McClanahan’s Hill William and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. Who went on to the next round: the trans-Pacific odyssey, or the tale of West Virginia? (You could also read our own Edan Lepucki’s Tournament contribution from last year, or else read our own Nick Moran’s Year in Reading piece on Scott McClanahan.)
Lydia Kiesling in the Tournament of Books
Intellectual Politics: A Book Review
Los Angeles Review of Books managing editor Evan Kindley reviews Michael Szalay’s Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party, and says it “reminds us of a time, not long ago, when literary intellectuals set great store by mainstream political parties, and vice versa.”
James Alan McPherson Passes Away
Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Alan McPherson has passed away at 72. His anthology Elbow Room won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1978. He was one of the first individuals to receive a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He graduated from Harvard Law school, but instead decided to pursue writing and later earned an MFA from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he was a professor emeritus.
RIP Jenny Diski
Jenny Diski, a prolific author who'd kept up a serialized diary of living with cancer since 2014, died this morning at the age of 68. Her partner, Ian Patterson, broke the news on Twitter, after which outlets including The Guardian confirmed it. The author had recently published her final book, a memoir.
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Muggles Appraising Wizards
Over the past few years, the Movoto Real Estate blog has become the internet’s number one destination for appraising the real estate in the Harry Potter universe. First they estimated the value of Hogwart’s Castle to be around $204 million, and now they’ve turned in an estimate of the Weasley family’s Burrow near Ottery St. Catchpole.
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Hell is Other People
The Morning News posts a terrific (if slightly ingenuous?) take on the vacuity of the poet's life in NYC: Frank O'Hara it ain't. Whether this is a failure of the city, or merely of the poet, is an open question. (via The Book Bench).
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The Real 24-Hour Bookstore
At one point, the only 24-hour bookstore was in Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, but Beijing has the first real 24-hour bookstore. The Sanlian Bookstore will be open around the clock for book lovers and insomniacs alike.