“‘So your idea is to drive across America and write about it without talking to a single American?’ ‘Yes.'” Karl Ove Knausgaard travels North America as “a tongue-in-cheek Tocqueville” for the New York Times Magazine. Pair with his piece for The Millions, “The View from My Window is a Constant Reminder,” and with Jonathan Callahan‘s reading of Knausgaard’s My Struggle.
“Tongue-in-Cheek Tocqueville”
It’s just not the same, is it?
Don’t like the idea of reading e-books to your kids? Turns out you’re not alone — a new study reported in the Christian Science Monitor says (pdf) that seventy percent of parents who own iPads prefer to use print books when reading to their children. If you read these articles, you might have seen this coming.
Tuesday New Release Day: Proulx; Ausubel; Notaro; de Botton; Cline
Out this week: Barkskins by Annie Proulx; Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty by Ramona Ausubel; I’m Just a Person by Tig Notaro; The Course of Love by Alain de Botton; and The Girls by Emma Cline (which we reviewed). For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
RIP Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel — Auschwitz survivor, Nobel Laureate, political activist, and author of Night — passed away yesterday at the age of 87. Here’s a quote that perfectly captures Wiesel’s essence, from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”
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The Bad Sex Award
What’s it like to win the Literary Review‘s Bad Sex award? As 2010 “winner” Rowan Somerville reports, “It’s a hard pill to swallow … Despite the magazine’s assertion that ‘it’s only a bit of fun’ there’s an atmosphere of bullying peculiar to public schools about the whole thing.”
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Arab Authors on Twitter
If you woke up this morning and thought, “You know, I could use more Arab authors on my Twitter feed,” then boy do I have the link for you.
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Depravity’s Rainbow
The #AuthorSexts trending topic had us rolling the other day, and now you can revisit some of the best submissions thanks to Electric Literature.
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