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
Grit & Grace
At The New York Times, Stanley Fish on True Grit as “a truly religious movie” in its understanding of the Christian idea of grace.
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Mavis Gallant, Diarist
Rejoice: Mavis Gallant’s private journals are being released by Knopf in the US.
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Quick Links
What happens when you co-write a book with someone who’s illiterate? YPTR has the details.LitLinks, a well stocked collection of links about a few hundred notable authors.iPoems arrives promising a plethora of downloadable poetry so you can jam to some verse on your iPod.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Pessl, Shomer, McBride, Keneally, Banville/Black
New this week: The Good Lord Bird by James McBride; Night Film by Marisha Pessl; The Twelve Rooms of the Nile by Enid Shomer; The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally; and Holy Orders, a new Quirke novel by John Banville/Benjamin Black. For more on these and other upcoming releases, check out our Great 2013 Second-Half Book Preview.
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First Cloud Atlas, Now This
Apparently David Magee, the screenwriter behind the Life of Pi movie, declared the book “unfilmable” before he was asked to adapt it.
Yellow Is the New Black
Yellow book covers are on the rise as publishers push for bold designs that pop for online shoppers. Also check out this comparison of U.S. and U.K. book covers.
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Tuesday New Release Day: DFW, Auster, LaCava, Lewis
Both Flesh and Not, a posthumous collection of David Foster Wallace essays, is now out in paperback. Also out: Report from the Interior by Paul Auster; a new paperback edition of Stephanie LaCava’s An Extraordinary Theory of Objects; and a new collection of essays by C.S. Lewis. For more on these and other great titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.
The Moralist With the Dragon Tattoo
Tim Parks takes Stieg Larsson seriously – sort of – in the NYRB.
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