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
J.D. Salinger’s Stories: Read Them If You Must
OK, so you’ve read our article about why you should respect J.D. Salinger’s wishes by not reading his unpublished stories, but you’ve also noticed that nobody’s really said anything about his stories that are out-of-print.
Writing For Your Life
“I think essay and memoir hang together in a balance. There’s any number of ways to strike it, but from Montaigne on down that balance seems key to their design.” The Paris Review interviews the essayist Michelle Orange, author of the recent This Is Running For Your Life.
Private Ennui
Marlon James, winner of this year’s Man Booker prize, believes that writers of color are “pandering to the white woman.” James touched on some related topics in the conversation with novelist Jeanette Winterson that we told you about yesterday.
Where Every Novel Takes Place
Electric Literature has posted a “Map of the City Where Every Novel Takes Place,” so now you can know exactly how to get from Middlemarch to The Jungle Book via Jurassic Park.
“One, Two, Three, Four. We Want this Superstore.”
Fox Books has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, The Onion reported. But in reality, Barnes & Noble is facing some big problems, which inspired Michael Agger to write a thank you note to the troubled bookstore. “Going to Barnes & Noble became a Saturday afternoon. It was as if a small liberal-arts college had been plunked down into a farm field.”
The Church of Scientology vs. The New Yorker
Last February, everyone was talking about Lawrence Wright‘s epic New Yorker profile of Paul Haggis and The Church of Scientology. But now, as The New York Times reports, the Church has released Freedom, a 51-page retaliatory glossy with DVD accompaniment.