“All I know was that in Paris I felt haunted, like a double exposure photograph that shows a figure and then a milky specter behind. I felt stalked by a creature of my own making, a monster that was both my mother and myself.” Darcey Steinke writes about Paris, loss, and monsters in an essay for Granta.
Mothers & Monsters
Enigmatic, Disturbing Sirens
Marina Warner reviews the "enigmatic and brief" and somewhat disturbing “The Professor and the Siren” for The Paris Review. As luck would have it, our own Sonya Chung reviewed the same story for The Millions.
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The Art of Fielding
Vanity Fair shares an excerpt from n+1 co-editor Chad Harbach's debut novel The Art of Fielding. The book appeared on our Great Second-Half of 2011 Book Preview, and it is presently available with each new subscription of n+1.
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A Nation of Poets
"Mr. Walt Whitman has imagined that a certain amount of violent sympathy with the great deeds and sufferings of our soldiers, and of admiration for our national energy, together with a ready command of picturesque language, are sufficient inspiration for a poet. If this were the case, we had been a nation of poets." A young Henry James reviews Whitman's Drum Taps.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Lewis, Saramago, DeWitt, Ondaatje, Enright, Hoffman, Harrison, Barnes, Adria, Hawkins
Michael Lewis's last book made our Hall of Fame. Now he's back with a new book that widens his focus to the financial dramas around the world with Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. Also out this week, Jose Saramago's posthumously published Cain, Helen DeWitt's long-awaited Lightning Rods, Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table (reviewed here), Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz, Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers, Jim Harrison's The Great Leader, and Booker shortlisted The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Also out: From the master of "molecular gastronomy," The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adria and, as noted in our recent piece "What Ever Happened to the New Atheism?" The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins.
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Bullish on Bookstagram
"It’s hard to say what truly moves the needle. Bookstagrammers help in that they get images of your book cover out there (and they make them look so pretty!), and readers need to see a book a couple of times, in a couple of different places, before they are inclined to buy it." Author Brenda Janowitz in Forbes about the surprising success of Instagram as a book marketing platform. See also Davey Davis from our own pages on the Insta-pornification of food.
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The Signature Smirk of the Absurd
This essay in the Times Literary Supplement on Kurt Vonnegut's "strangely central place in American fiction despite his occasional insistence on his own marginality" is certainly worth a read.
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