This Sunday, the Netherlands will take on Mexico in the second stage of the 2014 World Cup. To explain what makes the Dutchmen so formidable on the soccer pitch, Rowan Ricardo Phillips takes a look at the many “Shades of Oranje.”
The Flying Dutchmen
The End of One Era & Start of Another
"[I]n the world of letters, it is hard to imagine a more seismic change than this one." The New York Times announces that its longtime book critic Michiko Kakutani is stepping down after nearly four decades of reviews.
The Times also offers a roundup of her greatest hits, including writeups of Beloved, Infinite Jest, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and Bill Clinton's memoir My Life:
The book, which weighs in at more than 950 pages, is sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull — the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history.
This announcement was followed by the great news that repeat Year in Reading alumna Parul Sehgal will join Jennifer Senior and Dwight Garner as a Times book critic, leaving her position as senior editor of the NYT Book Review. Congratulations, Parul!
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Steal Like a Gypsy
The winner of this year’s Dzanc Books/Disquiet International Literary Program Award for fiction is Sofi Stambo. Here’s a rather savage piece of hers over at Guernica Magazine.
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LA Review of Self-Published Books
The Los Angeles Review will start reviewing one self-published book each month. They plan on applying "the same standards of good literature" to their reviews of self-published content as they do to traditionally published content.
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Supply and Demand
A London book dealer declares "The Great Book Glut of 2010."
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Christopher Beha On Pop Theology
Recommended listening: Christopher Beha, whose latest novel Arts & Entertainments we recently reviewed, talks with On Pop Theology about his new book, Catholicism, What Happened to Sophie Wilder? and The Bachelorette.
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Joyless
Poor Emily Schultz. Her debut novel is getting trashed on Amazon -- not because it’s a bad novel, but because a number of reviewers have confused her with Stephen King. (It doesn’t help that her magazine also shares a name with King’s novel.)
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How to Throw the Best Book Events
A new “book event crowdfunding platform” currently launched in beta, and it goes by the name of Togather. To get the party started, they interviewed Tumblr guru, Year in Reading alumna and all-around publishing maven Rachel Fershleiser about what it takes to throw a good book event.
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