“You could say that Fancy is about a couple of comical old kooks stuck in a dismal town finding creative ways of making themselves (and some luckless bystanders) crazy … and you wouldn’t be wrong. But you could also say that it’s the story of the composition of the manifesto of a bizarre and protean (protozoan?) order of being in which we’re all just patterns mistaking ourselves for people.” In a piece for BOMB Magazine, Scott Esposito interviews Jeremy M. Davies about Bernhard, Olive Garden, writing Fancy and reintroducing humor into modernist literature. Their conversation pairs well with our own Nick Ripatrazone‘s look at, well, the conversations of BOMB interviews.
Bernhard and Olive Garden
Tales of a Fanboy
If you’ve been on the Internet at any point in the last few weeks, you’re probably aware that Twin Peaks is coming back. The seminal (and seminally weird) show by David Lynch will return for nine episodes in 2016. At The Nervous Breakdown, Joshua Lyons explains what the show meant to him, with the help of visual proof that he copied Bobby Briggs’s hair.
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Weekend Prizewinners
Next by James Hynes has been named the winner of The Believer Book Award, and it was announced Friday that Thomas Teal’s translation from the Swedish of Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver took home the Best Translated Book Award. The book was competing with a shortlist of ten novels in translation.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Shriver, Leyner, Keret, Sebald, Larkin
New this week are The New Republic by Lionel Shriver, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner, Suddenly, a Knock at the Door by Etgar Keret, W.G. Sebald’s Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001, and The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin.
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I Sanction This
Talk about built-in irony: the class of tricky words known as “contronyms” can mean the opposite of what you think they mean.
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He Said, He Said (Tom Wolfe Edition)
Thomas Mallon seemed to enjoy Tom Wolfe’s new novel. Our own Nick Moran? Not so much.
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Backhanded
Writers have long been attracted to duels, if only because, for the most part, they offer an easy way to ramp up the conflict in a story. At Page-Turner, James Guida takes a look at their enduring relevance, with reference to the history of the duel in Europe. Pair with: our own Nick Moran on duels in Russian literature.
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Karen Russell and the Hungry Ghosts
Karen Russell recounts finishing her book in the midst of pregnancy, and the financial and time calculations that must be done to get to that last page.
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