“Sitting down to read The Actress, Amy Sohn’s newest novel, is even better than standing in line at the grocery store while the person in front of you disputes the price of a carton of orange juice, giving you extra time to read the tabloids. The Actress might be as licentious as a tabloid, but it is far more intelligently written. And, you probably won’t be reading it while standing in line inside a grocery store.”
Tabloid Fodder
One Last Taste
The last meal is a curious staple of modern executions, not least because it involves, in the words of one death-row inmate, “putting gas in a car that don’t have no motor.” At Lapham’s Quarterly, an essay on the ritual’s history, one that includes mention of famous last meals like terminally ill French President Francois Mitterrand’s final dinner of “Marennes oysters, foie gras, and two ortolan songbirds.”
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Mother Tongue
“Or again, does a ‘newsagent’ really need to become a ‘news dealer,’ a ‘flyover’ an ‘overpass,’ a ‘parcel’ a ‘package,’ or in certain circumstances ‘between’ ‘among’ and ‘like’ ‘such as’?” How to sound American.
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HMH Broke
With debts and liabilities in excess of $1 billion, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has officially filed for bankruptcy.
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Best (and Worst) Book Trailers
Melville House announced its Moby Award winners the week for book trailers in a number of serious and silly categories. (Full disclosure: I was a judge)
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The Quest to Write In Other Languages
A writer in both Italian and Arabic, Amara Lakhous writes on linguistic “polygamy” and her desire to become a trilingual writer. Pair with Hannah Gersen’s Millions piece on reading the English translation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words.
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New Release Tuesday
One of the most anticipated novels of the year is out today: David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Also newly available, Booker shortlister The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds.
He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Elected
J.K. Rowling says Donald Trump is worse than Voldemort. The Harry Potter author has come out against the presidential hopeful, tweeting that “Voldemort was nowhere near as bad.” Yes, she even said his name.
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