Canonical literature isn’t the only way to learn about America. The bestseller list can be equally as telling. Matthew Kahn is reading 100 years of No. 1 bestsellers from 1913 to 2013. He blogs about the books and discusses the project in an interview with Salon’s Laura Miller. When Miller asks what makes a bestseller, he claims, “A lot of it is just a matter of accessibility. A focus on plot and character rather than structure and the prose itself.”
Braving the Bestsellers
New Directions’ Birthday Bash
On a more optimistic note, New Directions, New York City’s inestimable and long struggling (but “long dazzling!”) publishing house, will be throwing itself a 75th birthday party on Thursday, October 27. (They just redesigned their website and colophon, too.)
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Tuesday New Release Day: Salter, Atkinson, Maazel, Kushner, Shearn, Rich, Perisic
New this week: All That Is by James Salter, Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel, The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner, The Mermaid of Brooklyn by Amy Shearn, The Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich, and Our Man in Iraq by Robert Perisic.
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Oh, Mr. Rochester!
Move over, Mr. Darcy and Edward Cullen: The readers of Mills & Boon romance novels (the UK’s answer to Harlequin romances) have voted Mr. Rochester of Charlotte Bronte‘s Jane Eyre the most romantic hero in literature.
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Quiet Creature
“João Gilberto Noll frustrates attempts to foresee the plot or to craft stories as they are traditionally understood and written. The series of events that appear in them are as tenuously linked into a broader narrative as those of a dream.” An interview with Noll translator Adam Morris.
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Dwight Garner on Commonplace Books
Do you jot down thought-provoking lines from books, shows, songs, and movies? Then you, too, keep a commonplace book.
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Those Silly Bloggers
NYC restaurateur Gabriel Stulman of Little Owl and Joseph Leonard says, “I’m turned off by how people are dining now in this blog-inundated world. Everyone wants to dissect and overanalyze their food and take pictures of it.” (via, thx Emre)
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