Do people enjoy writers like Pynchon and Nabokov in part because they’re so odd? A new paper suggests that we tend to like art when we believe its creator is eccentric. The Atlantic reads through a study that’s a bit of a strange one.
A Few Chapters Short of a Novel
Qiu Miaojin’s Survival Guide
Qiu Miaojin was a Taiwanese novelist and lesbian activist, and her short life has had a profound impact on queer literature since her suicide in 1995. Recently Bonnie Huie received a PEN translation grant so she could bring Miaojin’s best-known work, Notes of a Crocodile, to an English-speaking audience. You can read an excerpt of Huie’s translation on the Asian American Writers’ Workshop online publishing platform, The Margins.
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Melville the Whale
To honor Herman Melville for making the great white whale a metaphor for the inscrutable and unknowable, a prehistoric leviathan now bears his name. (Thanks, Kevin)
Indie Booksellers’ Choice Awards
Our own Emily St. John Mandel won one of the inaugural Indie Booksellers’ Choice Awards yesterday for her novel The Singer’s Gun. The other honorees for this award, which was voted on by indie booksellers around the country, were Paolo Bacigalupi for The Windup Girl, Adam Levin for The Instructions, Karl Marlantes for Matterhorn, and Nina Revoyr for Wingshooters.
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An Amis For Us All
If this was the Summer of Martin Amis (which seems to have been the case), then prepare yourselves for the coming Fall of Kingsley Amis, courtesy of the folks at the New York Review of Books Classics and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
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Quark Winner
Big congrats to Millions staff writer Edan Lepucki whose essay “Reading and Race: On Slavery in Fiction” has come in second for the 3 Quarks Daily Arts & Literature Prize.
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