“It’s the marriage of one kind of darkness to another… the black storm cloud of Neel’s pen is well suited to Dostoyevsky’s questions of God, reason, and doubt.” On Alice Neel‘s illustrations for The Brothers Karamazov, from The Paris Review. Pair with our own Kevin Hartnett’s much lighter take on the novel, “Reading The Brothers Karamazov: Even a Toddler Knows a Funny Name When He Hears One.”
One Darkness to Another
Festivities
Recommended Reading: Alex Preston on Milan Kundera’s first novel in fifteen years.
Tuesday New Release Day: Phillips, Tillman, Bender
Probably the biggest literary debut the week is Arthur Phillips’ The Tragedy of Arthur, a faux memoir about the surfacing of a long-lost Shakespeare play. Also out this week is the first book from former Soft Skull head Richard Nash’s new venture Red Lemonade: Lynne Tillman’s Someday This Will Be Funny. And, finally, now out in paperback is Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. (Our two reviews)
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True Coffeeshop Story
“Literary interviews became popular in the eighteen-eighties, but Richard Altick, the late professor of Victorian literature at Ohio State University, traces the public fascination with writers’ homes at least as far back as the eighteen-forties, when there was a vogue for books describing the houses and landscapes of famous authors, complete with engravings and, later, photographs.” On the strangeness of literary celebrity.