Recommended Reading: Rob Hart’s short short, “Foodies,” which concerns itself with the fine art of “human charcuterie.”
“You are pioneers.”
Bookstore Pricing Wars
E-book pricing wars continue. Sony tries to hit the Kindle where it hurts by offering cheaper e-books. Meanwhile, $0 is becoming an important price point at the Kindle store.
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Suitor by Suitor
At Salon, Bird by Bird author Anne Lamott recounts her year in the online dating world, a year which she says was complicated by the fact that “91 percent of men snore loudly.”
Defense Against Detractors
Recommended reading: Adele Waldman defends the purpose and form of the novel and balances David Shield's Reality Hunger against Anna Karenina.
William Gass, 1924-2017
“He was a glutton for books who treated each text as a plate he was required to clean.” Author and critic William Gass died this week at 93, reports The Washington Post. The recipient of three National Book Critics Circle awards for criticism and four Pushcart prizes, Gass was awarded the PEN/Nabakov Award for lifetime achievement in 2000. See our reviews of Middle C, a novel that took Gass almost 20 years to finish, and his most recent essay collection Life Sentences, which amply demonstrated his background as “a former philosophy professor, but more appropriately a philosopher of the word and an esthete.” We were also lucky enough to have him pen a Year in Reading entry for us back in 2009: “I miss the leisure that let me read just for fun, not to critique, or pronounce, or even to put on a list, but simply to savor,” Gass lamented. Nonetheless, he continued,“I do, from time to time, pick up old friends who never disappoint but will promise me a page or two of pleasure between art and ordinary life.”
“Ish” Writes to Granta
From Granta, we learn that Kazuo Ishiguro likes to go by “Ish.”
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Skirmishing With the Eminati
Look out, Darwin -- Wolfe's coming for you. Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech, which we reviewed a couple of days ago, takes aim at Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky: "Like an industrial engineer who also makes bespoke dueling pistols in his shed on the weekends, Mr. Wolfe has made a side career of skirmishing with the eminati (his term) in an array of cultural fields. If fighting enlivens one’s mornings, Mr. Wolfe has had little need of caffeine."
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The Literary Identity
“Being someone who’s an outsider, there are so many ways in which the world acts on you or assigns narratives to you.” Literary Hub interviews author Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi about literature, identity, and her new novel, Call Me Zebra. From our archives: Nur Nasreen Ibrahim's review of Call Me Zebra.