In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, Ice Trilogy author Vladimir Sorokin looks at the current events related to Ukraine, Russia, and Crimea, and notes that “the Russian state’s ‘vertical power’ structure” (which is to say “monarchical structure”) is what keeps the Russian people held “hostage to the psychosomatic quirks of its leader.”
“Let the past collapse at the right time”
Crunching the Reading Numbers
Some cool number-crunching from Millions staff writer Patrick at the Goodreads blog. As we’ve long suspected, reading isn’t all about “new,” and the data shows a long tail of older books that are still high on people’s reading lists.
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Grocery Shopping with Jess Walter
“I didn’t want to like Jess Walter.” Ann K. Ryles interviews Jess Walter about his new short story collection We Live in Water, fatherhood, poverty, and what he daydreams about while waiting in line at the grocery store at The Rumpus.
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Interview with David Bajo
An interview with the author David Bajo, on his new novel Panopticon: “I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of privacy, especially how our society constantly seeks ways to invade it technologically, how we consistently undermine it by happily participating in digital omniscience, yet how we are outraged by the pain that technology and that desire sometimes cause.”
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Pen Pals Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
Janet Maslin at the New York Times reviews the collection Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters: “‘Hasn’t it been awful?’ Kerouac would write to Ginsberg in 1959. ‘We were so swingy? And now young poets are sneering at us?’”
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New Quarterly Conversation
A new issue of The Quarterly Conversation covers Gaddis, Müeller, and the Nordic masculinity of Per Petterson, among other topics.
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