Junot Diaz, author of Pulitzer-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, started his auspicious career in the most unlikely of imaginary places: crafting stories for his friends in the tabletop roleplay game Dungeons & Dragons.
The Dungeon Master’s Workshop
The First Perec
On the rediscovery of Georges Perec's first novel, Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere, a book "connected by a hundred threads to every part of the literary universe that Perec went on to create—but not like anything else that he wrote," from the New York Review of Books.
“He could easily get seasonal work as a shopping-mall Santa.”
"Mad scientist of smut" Nicholson Baker gets the New York Times treatment.
First Lines of the New Tom McCarthy
Here are the first lines of the new Tom McCarthy novel, C, forthcoming in September: "Dr. Learmont, newly appointed general practitioner for the districts of West Masedown and New Eliry, rocks and jolts on the front seat of a trap as it descends the lightly sloping path of Versoie House. He has sore buttocks: the seat’s hard and uncushioned."
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Tuesday New Release Day: Harrison; Heidegger; Molina; Hornby; Newlyn
Out this week: Brown Dog by Jim Harrison; a new paperback edition of Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought; In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina; a collection of Nick Hornby’s Believer columns; and a new biography of William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
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A Rush of Blood to the Head?
An intriguing pairing: Norman Rush tackles James Ellroy's Blood's A Rover in the current New York Review of Books.
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