Keeping track of the art mentioned in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is almost as difficult as keeping track of Boris. Fortunately, Laura Petelle made a Pinterest board of all the art in the novel, complete with excerpts. Start reading from the bottom up, and beware of spoilers.
Theo Decker’s Pinterest
On Stage With Myself
It looks like today is your lucky day. This piece from The Literary Hub gives you two for the price of one: first, there’s Herta Muller’s gorgeous take on the poetry of Liu Xia, and next, a careful selection of those very same poems.
2011 in Physics Books
Every year brings a fresh new crop of popular books on physics and cosmology, or so they say. 2011 was no exception, featuring books on dark matter and dark energy, the Large Hadron Collider, time, the multiverse, cosmic mortality, a bit of history, biography, and even a celebration of “fringe physics.” Here is a list of top ten picks.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Dante, Wilson, Riley, Waite
New this week: Clive James’s translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Edward O. Wilson’s Letters to a Young Scientist, Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley, and The Carrion Birds by Urban Waite.
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Life on Mars
“One of the advantages to being a novelist is removing oneself from the chatter of the fray and trying to get a read and a historical context on what’s happening in one’s own time.” The Guardian interviews Rachel Kushner about women’s prisons, remorse, and her new novel, The Mars Room. Pair with: our review calls Kushner’s latest a “brutal, unforgiving, and often grimly funny tour de force of wasted lives.”
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The Kirkus Is Back in Town
The recipients of the 2016 Kirkus Prize have been announced, among them the novel The Sport of Kings by C. E. Morgan and In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi, a meditation on her father’s gender transition, in the non-fiction category. We reviewed two of the other fiction finalists this year: Carousel Court (here) and The Underground Railroad (here).
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Four David Mitchell books on the way
David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks now has an official release date, as well as ample pre-publication details to whet your appetite. News of the book, which will be available in September, also came with the announcement of a new three-book deal with Random House.
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No Bastion for Books
“She gathered books to display for attendees and discovered that inside the cover of one, ‘The Koran for Dummies,’ someone had written “lies cover to cover,” drawn a swastika and made a disparaging remark about the Prophet Muhammad.” The president of the American Library Association reports “startling increases” in 2016 of vandalism, including hateful messages, at libraries. The Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has begun formally tracking such incidents to determine whether the increase is “a blip or a trend.”
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David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello Talk Hip-Hop
The book David Foster Wallace co-authored with Mark Costello about the pair’s “uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop” will be re-released in the US next Tuesday. UK readers look like they’re going to get a reissue of the book on their shelves as well.
I’m also a devoted reader of The Millions, and I think it was your review that initially pointed me to the book, so I’m thrilled to see my project mentioned here.
I’m not a very visual thinker, nor do I know much about art, so I was having trouble with the scene-setting at the beginning of the book. I kept googling all the pictures to try to get in my head what Theo and his mom were looking at. Then I started pinning them because I thought the other folks in my book club (which is reading the book this month) might also like to look at it. Then I got out the post-it flags and it just kind-of grew!
This is so so perfect. Thank you to Laura for the creation and to The Millions for the share.