Though excellent fiction has been staged in restaurants (Richard Russo’s Empire Falls comes to mind, as well as YA novel Hope was Here), I have to admit Rebecca Makkai at Ploughshares has a point that dining-in-public scenes are getting a bit old. “All the unfolding of napkins and poking at the French fries… it’s filler.”
Get out of the restaurant
El Presidente
Following the death of Hugo Chavez, the publishing industry is gearing up to provide retrospectives of his life. At the Christian Science Monitor, Whitney Eulich reviews Comandante, a book that claims Chavez was “this close” to becoming a dictator.
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Dispatches from Down Under
“With each step, I had to remind myself to touch pavement again, as if in a moment’s forgetfulness I might slip the earth’s magnetic pull and go pinwheeling over Sydney Harbor and out to sea,” our own Michael Bourne writes in his Dispatches column at The Common, “Stanley Street.”
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Business v. Literature
Have the literati really framed the way we think about capitalism by disparaging business practices? If so, Forbes' Bruce Upbin is asking readers for examples of books (other than Mildred Pierce) in which business is portrayed nicely.
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Who Reviews the Reviewers?
Our own Lydia Kiesling discusses James Wood’s literary “lodestars,” and also looks at “what is fascinating, if not exactly fun” about The Fun Stuff, the critic’s latest essay collection.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Ronson; Hunter; Daum; Gruen; Shafak; Boyle
Out this week: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson; The World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter; Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, edited by Meghan Daum; At the Water's Edge by Sara Gruen; The Architect's Apprentice by Elif Shafak; and The Harder They Come by T.C. Boyle. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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On Reading and Personality Disorders
“Six thousand books is a lot of reading, true, but the trash like Hell's Belles and Kid Colt and The Legend of the Lost Arroyo and even Part-Time Harlot, Full-Time Tramp that I devoured during my misspent teens really puff up the numbers. And in any case, it is nowhere near a record. Winston Churchill supposedly read a book every day of his life, even while he was saving Western Civilization from the Nazis. This is quite an accomplishment, because by some accounts Winston Churchill spent all of World War II completely hammered.”