Here’s one for all you Knausgaard fans: Newsday has a short excerpt from My Struggle: Book Three. (Related: if you’re not yet a Knausgaard fan, allow Jonathan Callahan to extend an invitation to the club.)
An Excerpt from the New Knausgaard
Unevenness As Virtue
"The concept that being American means, by definition, having an ideal that you’ve failed to live up to—that’s another crucial thing I learned from [James Alan] McPherson. It is not a rejection of America for Michelle Obama to note that her daughters are growing up in a house built by slaves. Or a rejection of a white writer to point out that Fitzgerald was a racist. Instead, it is American to admit those facts and to find in that admission a way forward." On American values, Barack Obama, and the legacy of James Alan McPherson over at The Literary Hub.
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The Underground Railroad: The Series
Moonlight director Barry Jenkins plans to adapt Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad as a limited-run series. In his review of the novel for our site last year, Greg Walklin gushed that "Whitehead’s brilliance is on constant display."
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The Threat of Death
The New Yorker has published the chapter of Salman Rushdie's forthcoming memoir, Joseph Anton, that describes the circumstances of his life immediately after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's spiritual leader in 1989, called for his execution by proclaiming a fatwā on the writer, after the controversial treatment of Islamic history and the Prophet Muhammad in The Satanic Verses. PEN American, by the way, accepts donations online.
The New Face of Poetry
Denmark has a new superstar, and he’s a poet named Yahya Hassan. At 18, Hassan has published a poetry collection that sold 100,000 copies in three months -- a figure that, in Denmark, translates to one copy for every fifty residents. At the LARB, Pedja Jurisic delves into the young poet's incendiary politics.
Reviews of Man Booker Longlist
Last week, we provided excerpts for several of the titles on the Man Booker longlist. This week, The New Yorker has helpfully rounded up reviews of the titles.
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