At the LARB, Millions contributor Nathan Deuel reviews Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball, which we covered as part of our Great 2014 Book Preview. Nathan calls the novel “daring and odd” and notes that, as the plot advances, “even we readers become slightly shaky witnesses.” You can learn more about Jesse Ball’s work in our own Janet Potter’s review of his novel The Curfew.
Testimonies
Paperback Swap
Paperback Swap lets you can swap your books with other community members.
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Franzen on HBO’s The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen dishes about the forthcoming HBO adaptation of The Corrections.
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Finding Mavis
Mavis Gallant, who passed away a year ago this February, published a total of a hundred and sixteen short stories in The New Yorker, which puts her on par with short story factories like John Cheever and John Updike. Yet by the time she died, she was penniless and alone, a fact which worried the few people in Paris who knew her well. In The Walrus, David MacFarlane examines what her writing meant to him. Pair with: Laurel Berger on her own fascination with the author.
Taking Risks on the Page
Over at Catapult, Idra Novey writes on how her experience as a translator changed how she approaches her own work as a novelist. Pair with Magdalena Edwards’s Millions essay on reading Clarice Lispector in English.
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What’s “Appropriate”
We’ve been following the YA debate quite attentively – I wrote about it just last week – but Sarah Burnes‘s addition to the conversation, a blog post for The Paris Review, is one of the most eloquent I’ve read. In defense of reading YA fiction as a “grown-up” she writes, “The binary between children’s and adult fiction is a false one, based on a limited conception of the self. I have not ceased to be the person I was when I was an adolescent; in fact, to think so seems to me like a kind of dissociation from a crucial aspect of one’s self. And the critic should be concerned with what is good and what is bad, what is art and what is not—not with what’s ‘appropriate.'”
You Know the Story
“Storytelling is an indispensable human preoccupation, as important to us all—almost—as breathing. From the mythical campfire tale to its explosion in the post-television age, it dominates our lives. It behooves us then to try and understand it.” On the inherent sameness of stories with John Yorke from The Atlantic.
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A Not-So Moveable Feast
Have you visited the legendary Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris? Were you aware that bookstore you visited is not actually that same legendary Shakespeare and Company? Erin Zaleski at The Daily Beast takes a look at the history of this literary institution of the Lost Generation.
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