Get your mind right ahead of the Game of Thrones Season 4 premiere by reading this just-released chapter of George R. R. Martin’s sixth Song of Ice and Fire installment, Winds of Winter. Martin told fans in a recent blog post, “The new chapter is actually an old chapter. But no, it’s not one I’ve published or posted before.”
(Winds of) Winter is Coming.
Carlos Fuentes Passes Away
Carlos Fuentes, public intellectual and pivotal literary figure in not only Latin American but all of literature, passed away yesterday at the age of 83. Publisher’s Weekly recently interviewed the author about his forthcoming novel, Vlad.
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Virginia Woolf Meets House Party
At what point does Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and the 1990 cinematic classic, House Party, intersect? Many points, actually, according to this incisive comparison of the two done by Sean Gill for The Offing.
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Black Balloon’s Horatio Nelson Prize
Black Balloon has announced a new Horatio Nelson fiction prize, and the terms are pretty sweet. There’s no entry fee, and one winner will receive $5,000 and a book deal. Details can be found here.
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Manic Paranoid Torpor
“Soldiers eat beef teriyaki and chicken cavatelli M.R.E.s in a war zone where ‘armored ruins’ line the roads, ‘charred corpses scattered in among the blasted metal’; and sniper fire and I.E.D. ambushes are a constant threat: ‘the chaos out there, the crazy Arabic writing and abu-jabba jabber, the lawless traffic, the hidden danger and buzz and stray bullets and death looming from every overpass.'” Michiko Kakutani reviews Roy Scranton’s War Porn for The New York Times. Here’s an old review from The Millions that shares a bit of Scranton’s lingering sentiment regarding the war.
Speaking of The New Yorker…
Is just me, or has The New Yorker been resurgent the last few weeks? In addition to the David Grann piece mentioned below, we’ve gotten: Bloomberg, diving, James Wood‘s most cogent essay to date on atheism and belief, and a F-B-P triple play. (That’s Friend to Bilger to Paumgarten, for those keeping score at home.) And I read the fiction for five issues in a row – a personal best. I know they assemble these things far in advance, but it still feels like the Ian Frazier “Siberia” two-parter, eight years in the making, started some kind of conflagration of awesomeness. Thoughts?
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Men Crying Over Poetry
A new anthology celebrates poetry “that moves men to tears,” and it includes the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. Meanwhile, for BBC Newsnight, Clive James gets choked up while reading Keith Douglas’s “Canoe.”
In The Kitchen
What’s cooking? Just an interview with the author who’s ghostwritten seemingly every bestselling cookbook out there.
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