You may know that The Butter founder Roxane Gay had a banner year in 2014. The Year in Reading alum published a collection of essays and her debut novel. At Salon, she talks with Sara Scribner, sharing her thoughts on modern feminism, Lena Dunham and her plans for her next book.
Where We Are
“Bleeding beautiful streams”
“It’s easy to attribute genius to a dead man, a legendary philanderer, liar and self-mythologizer who died beautiful and curly-haired. But ‘What About This’ is an authentic outpouring like a warm river in full flood; you get swept off the bank and its languid physicality destroys you.” On Frank Stanford’s Collected Poems.
“One story shook the Soviet Union.”
Writing for the BBC, Steve Rosenberg looks at the lasting impact and significance of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was published fifty years ago this month.
A Swan of Old
“After only a few lines of Mallarmé, you are engulfed in fine mist, and terror sets in.” Here’s a piece from The New Yorker on contending with the supreme enigma of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry.
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The L.A. Times Book Prize in Fiction Finalists
The L.A. Times Book Prize finalists for 2013 have been announced. The five finalists in fiction are: Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs (also see her Year in Reading post), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Susan Steinberg’s Spectacle, and Daniel Woodrell’s The Maid’s Version. The winner will be announced on April 11.
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Living Like Fitzgerald
Looking for a new summer home? Something with an impressive literary pedigree? You’re in luck! Now you can buy the house where F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gastsby for the low, low price of $3.8 million.
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King Braggadocio
“I was dropping out of college and had begun a novel and returned to New York. A bookstore in Manhattan announced a rare reading and signing by Anthony Burgess, a primary hero of mine at the time, for his autodidact’s erudition and braggadocio, and for how he’d gentrified a number of outre genres just by picking them up and mingling them with his erudition and braggadocio.” At the LARB, Jonathan Lethem remembers a formative reading by the author.
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I gave my wife Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist for Christmas because she has been on a feminist lit tear lately, eating up De Beauvoir, Firestone, Freidan and Dworkin. She was fifty pages into it when she finally asked me, “How come you got me this shitty memoir?”