Sanitize and Simplify
Mo Yan’s “Bull”
Recommended Reading: “Bull” by Mo Yan, the latest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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“The flamboyant misanthrope and the restrained one”
If you've ever had a successful friend you secretly envied and maybe even hated, you may be in startlingly good company: a new reading of an old letter between Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot indicates that the "flamboyant misanthrope and the restrained one" shared exactly this kind of frenemyship. Unrelated: a short recording of Eliot reading "The Naming of Cats."
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Expiration Date
“Echoes are etched into the pages thanks to margin-scrawled notes, a yellowed coffee splatter or sticky peanut-butter-and-jelly fingerprints.” In her project “Expired,” photographer Kerry Mansfield documents the life of library books. We suggest pairing The Guardian's gallery of her photos with our own Jacob Lambert's “Open Letter to the Person Who Wiped Boogers on My Library Book.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Vargas Llosa, Johnson, Hustvedt, Flynn, Cul de Sac
New this week are Mario Vargas Llosa's The Dream of the Celt, Soul of a Whore and Purvis: Two Plays in Verse by Denis Johnson, Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays by Siri Hustvedt, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, and Team Cul de Sac, a book done in tribute to the great comic done by Richard Thompson and to raise money for research into Parkinson's, which Thompson was diagnosed with in 2009.
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Fantasy Authors game
If Fantasy Football is football for people who don't like dirt or concussions, here's a Fantasy Football for people who don't like football. Book Riot has the details, which involve tracking your favorite authors' career highlights much like an athlete's: "publishes a book," sure, but also "appears in another author’s book trailer," "fatwa issued against author," and "dies." Our own Edan Lepucki makes the Rookies bracket, but, please--no fatwas just to win.
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