Recommended Reading: Lindsay Whalen’s interview with Lev Grossman, which goes nicely with our review of The Magicians.
“My life when I was that age was such a disaster”
Literary Tastemaker Extraordinare
“In a new biography, The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Laura Claridge argues that Blanche Knopf was actually the more important and influential of the two Knopfs. That’s a stretch, but her book is still a long-overdue acknowledgment of the pioneering role Blanche played at a time when women were nearly invisible in the business world.” Find out more about Blanche Knopf at The New Yorker. Edan Lepucki’s 2011-2012 list on why not to self-publish is still relevant.
Sensitive Issues
You may have heard that Jess Row has a new book on shelves. The plot follows a man who undergoes a surgical procedure to change his race. In an interview at Guernica, the author talks to Grace Bello about writing and race, teaching in Hong Kong and what it means to grow up in Baltimore. You could also read the author’s Year in Reading entry.
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I Choose Love
Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik has picked Nicole Krauss’s History of Love for the October selection of Book of the Month. You could also check out her Year in Reading in The Millions.
And So It Goes
Before he died, Kurt Vonnegut gave the go-ahead that has allowed Charles Shields to construct And So It Goes, an incisive, gossipy page-turner of a biography, even if it’s hard to tell just how authorized this book really is.
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Over the Frontier
“I have a happy nature, / But Mother is always sad, / I enjoy every moment of my life, / – Mother has been had.” Saturday got you down? Here are a few brilliant little poems and their accompanying doodles by the late, great Stevie Smith.
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Booksellers React to Borders’ Bankruptcy
Half of all restaurants that open close,” WORD owner Christine Onorati says. On the other hand, Red Lemonade publisher Richard Nash hopes former Borders employees can find ways to continue “operating as the matchmakers of the book ecosystem.”
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Literary Insults
This week in book-related infographics: a look at history’s greatest literary insults, from Capote to Hemingway to Faulkner.