“Readers have grown tired of the slew of celebrity memoirs,” reports The Guardian. “About time,” we say.
Exhausted by Celebrity
MetaFilter Asks
MetaFilter asks, what's one book that everyone should read?
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New Short Story by DFW
"Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body." The New Yorker posts a new short story, "Backbone," by David Foster Wallace.
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Why Is Iceland So Literary?
One in ten residents of Iceland will publish something in their lifetime. (Compare that to the United States.) And all residents receive the bókatíðindi – a volume listing approximately 90% of all books being published in Iceland – free of charge. Indeed, as Mark Medley notes, when it comes to literary ambitions, the Land of Fire and Ice is “punching above its weight class.”
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Not Quite a Review
“This is a tricky novel to review. I'm not even sure it is a novel. And I'm not certain as to whether its fragmentary nature belies an organic structure of astutely sewn intention or is merely a disingenuous device to conceal a let's-get-something-out cobbling together of unpublished material lying around the writer's desk. What I can tell you is this: I was powerfully engaged and richly entertained by Sergio De La Pava’s Personae.” (Related: our own Garth Risk Hallberg wrote a profile of De La Pava.)
Nebulous Plotlines
You’ve probably heard it before: never end a story with the phrase “it was all a dream.” Unfortunately for the person who taught you this rule, many classic stories (including Anna Karenina) take place at least partially in dreams. In the NYRB, Francine Prose investigates the trope in fiction.
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Imagining My Way In
Recommended (Heartbreaking) Reading: On a father's suicide and a son's journey to learn a bit about the life of the man he hardly even knew.
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First Novel Prize Longlist
The Center for Fiction has released the longlist for the First Novel Prize. The Girls by Emma Cline (see our review) and What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell (see our review) are among the novels to make the cut.
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