According to a recent survey, Danes are the happiest people in the world. This came as a surprise, writes Mathilde Walter Clark, to most of her fellow Scandinavians, who know very well the unhappier elements of their daily lives. The problem, she suggests, is that words like “happiness,” “ambition” and “contentment” have subtly different meanings in different languages — in other words, happiness in Denmark isn’t the same thing as happiness in America. You could also read our own Emily St. John Mandel’s review of the Danish writer Jonas T. Bengtsson’s A Fairy Tale.
Not Exactly Rotten
Jericho Brown and Carmen Maria Machado on the Meaning of Pride
Jericho Brown and Carmen Maria Machado examine their personal relationships to Pride, 50 years after the first Pride March.
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More Top Books for 2009
More lists of the top books of 2009 are coming out. Now up: Amazon’s favorites. Tops on their list is Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, recently named a National Book Award finalist.
What Bolano Read
Part 2 of “What Bolano Read” by Tom McCartan at Melville House.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sacks; Hitchens; Li; Whitman
Out this week: Gratitude by Oliver Sacks; And Yet by Christopher Hitchens; The Lost Garden by Ang Li; and a new edition of Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems by Walt Whitman. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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Chabon and Waldman Go HBO
Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman are teaming with Darren Aronofsky on an HBO pilot, Hobgoblin.
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