As you might have heard, the tenth annual Morning News Tournament of Books will commence this Thursday, and to kick things off, the site held a pre-Tournament playoff round. In it, Lev Grossman and David Gutowski (aka Largehearted Boy) try to predict what Geraldine Brooks will choose as her novel of the year. (Our own Lydia Kiesling takes part on the 18th.)
Warm Ups
No award given
Former Pulitzer Prize juror Laura Miller gives a little insight into how the award works, and posits some possible reasons that the fiction award may have been withheld.
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Perry’s “Oops”
“Oops is everything that Perry could not do if he still wanted to be President.” What you missed while not watching last night’s Republican Debate in Detroit.
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Hollywood McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy’s written a spec script about “a respected lawyer who thinks he can dip a toe in to the drug business without getting sucked down.” I think we all know where that’s headed.
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Smells Like Teen Dispirit
“I saw it as a breath of fresh dark honest night air. I could live in my grief and be weird in my grief.” A.N. Devers writes about her love of Twin Peaks for Longreads, situating the show within her contemporary experiences of losing her grandparents and her girlhood.
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Big Mama
Recommended Reading: On Carmen Balcells, “The Woman Behind Latin America’s Literary Boom,” in The New Yorker. Her authors called her “Big Mama” after Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s queen of Macondo. She worked with many of the authors included on our Latin American Nobel Candidates list.
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A Narrative Made Up of Many Narratives
Elizabeth Karp-Evans interviews How to Read a Novelist author John Freeman about editing, American narratives, and his goals for Freeman’s.