Tolstoy has a new book out. No, not that Tolstoy — Sofiya Tolstoy, wife of Leo Nikolayevich. Her long-lost novella, which languished for years in the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, has finally been published, as part of an expanded edition of her husband’s The Kreutzer Sonata. At Slate, Ron Rosenbaum praises her story, calling it “graceful, emotionally intuitive and heartbreaking.” Related: 8 experts on whether Leo Tolstoy is better than Dostoevsky.
Wifely Pursuits
A Daredevil By Any Other Name
Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life might well be the only book in history to draw comparisons between creative writers and stunt pilots. At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova calls attention to a description of Dave Rahm, the real-life pilot who inspired Dillard’s analogy.
●
●
Coda
Sad that Mad Men is over? We've got just the thing. Back in 2012, our own Hannah Gersen compiled a list of ten books to read when a given season -- or, in this case, the series -- comes to an end.
Stiff Manners
It takes a certain skill to link Taipei by Tao Lin, My Struggle Part I and Part II by Karl Ove Knausgaard and an old book on Italian painting in a single essay, but Zadie Smith is (naturally) the writer for the job. In a new piece for The NY Review of Books, she asks the reader to “imagine [a drawing of a corpse] represents an absolute certainty about you, namely, that you will one day be a corpse.”
●
●
Against Wunderkinds
Recommended reading: Alexander Chee's essay "Against Wunderkinds."
●
●
Winesburg, Ohio Online
The University of Virginia Library (last mentioned for its William Faulkner recordings) has made the text of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio available online in its entirety.
●
●
Book Club Blunder
What would happen if you anonymously attended a book club about your own novel? Kevin Baker discovered the embarrassing consequences when a meeting on his novel Dreamland turned negative.
●
●