“I find it amusing that people think trying to read a book in a language you do not understand is the most boring activity in the world. If you are interested in how literature works, these things are interesting.” On Lydia Davis‘s interest in learning to read Norwegian literature and writing at the end of the world, from the newly-launched Lit Hub.
To Learn Norwegian
Audio Conversation With Paul Harding
At Bloom this week, a spotlight on Pulitzer-Prize winner Paul Harding, whose second novel Enon has just been released. Plus a special treat: Joe Schuster speaks to Harding by phone in this two-part interview.
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East of Here
Recommended Reading: This interview with the director of the National Steinbeck Center.
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“Ephphatha!”
Recommended Reading: “Saliva” by Álvaro Enrigue, whose English-language debut Hypothermia was published this month by the folks at Dalkey Archive Press.
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More NYC books
If you haven’t gotten enough of literary New York quite yet, here’s what the Guardian (UK) thinks you should be reading about “the American dream concretised in a shimmering mirage, the burgeoning metropolis of hope built on foundations of money, drugs and exploitation.” Less judgmentally, Grantland’s Kevin Nguyen focuses on two new books set in Queens, recommending High As the Horses’ Bridles by The Millions’ own Scott Cheshire, which is no Brooklyn hipster novel: his opening scene (“among the finest published this year”) has a 12-year-old offering a prophecy of Armageddon.
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Writing About Home in Pittsburgh
A nice complement to Edan’s essay today about writing in Los Angeles, The Metropolis Case author Matthew Gallaway writes about the challenges of representing his home city of Pittsburgh in his fiction. “For starters, there’s the question of accuracy.”
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“How an ordinary Asian fell in love with The Smiths”
You may not expect much from a write-up about The Smiths’ new collected box set, Complete, but that’s about to change. In a phenomenal piece on the relationship between racial (in particular Asian) otherness and the UK band’s music, Sukhdev Sandhu explains how Morrissey’s “lyrics and persona mapped out a structure of feeling that spoke to my own floundering selfhood.”
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