Recommended reading, perfect for dreary January weekends: David Sedaris writes about “ways to have fun at the beach” for The New Yorker.
January Beaches
Aragorn’s Publishing Company
Viggo Mortenson, a.k.a. Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, also happens to have started a publishing company. Perceval Press is devoted to showcasing the talents of little-known authors and artists who might otherwise go undiscovered.
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Autism as a Literary Device
Susan Sontag once wrote that the truest way to portray illness was without metaphor. Our own Marie Myung-Ok Lee takes a look at autism in recent literature and the ways its writers (ranging from Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem, and Louise Erdrich) have often reduced those with autism to a literary construct.
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Song of Myself
At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell delves into the history of the self-interview, which you can find many examples of over at The Nervous Breakdown. Mark cites examples of self-interviews by prominent writers, including Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Year in Reading alum John Banville.
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Happy Ministries
Fans of Arundhati Roy are celebrating at the news that the author will publish a new novel, her first in 20 years, reports Electric Literature; The Ministry of Utmost Unhappiness is scheduled for release in 2017. Our own Garth Risk Hallberg maaaaay have poked a bit of fun a few years back at the title of Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things, but that was all in good fun.
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Where Glowsticks Are Currency
In this month’s issue of GQ, exemplary road-tripper Gideon Lewis-Kraus (of A Sense of Direction fame) pays a visit to the Electric Daisy Carnival, where the raves of the ‘90s have yet to go out of fashion.
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Family Tree
“Every evening we spent an hour and a half in the drawing-room, and, as far back as I can remember, he found some way of amusing us himself…many of the great English poems now seem to me inseparable from my father; I hear in them not only his voice, but in some sort his teaching and belief,” Virginia Woolf wrote of her father for his biographer, but who was Leslie Stephen, exactly?
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New Chabon Story
Recommended reading: A new short story from Michael Chabon is now available from Tablet.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Smith, Hitchens, Straub, Eco, Rothbart, Seidel, Morris, Seals, Eugenides
A big week for books: Zadie Smith’s NW is out (read the first lines), as is Christopher Hitchens’s Mortality, a collection of essays penned while he fought cancer (our essay on Hitchens’ death) (his collection Arguably is out in paperback today). More new books: Emma Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, Umberto Eco’s essay collection Inventing the Enemy, Davy Rothbart’s essay collection My Heart Is an Idiot, Frederick Seidel’s poetry collection Nice Weather, documentarian Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, and the Navy Seal book about the bin Laden mission. Also, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides is now out in paperback (read Eugenides on the book’s genesis), as is Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer winner The Swerve.
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