Last week, I pointed readers to a recording of Benedict Cumberbatch on BBC Radio, reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Over at Slate, Rebecca Schuman explains why Cumberbatch is the story’s ideal reader, unpacking his “withering, perfectly enunciated deadpan.”
A Proper Sociopath
Useable Objects
Recommended Reading: This piece from The Atlantic on Marie Kondo and the “privilege of clutter.” While you’re at it, go and read our own Janet Potter’s experience with Kondo’s wildly popular The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
Coetzee on Murray
Millions favorite J. M. Coetzee analyzes “the angry genius” of Les Murray for The New York Review of Books.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Rachman; Card; Winton; Conn; Dugan; Pritchett; Flynn; Yejide
The Imperfectionists author and Year in Reading alum Tom Rachman has a new novel on shelves this week, as does Orson Scott Card. Also out: Eyrie by Tim Winton; O, Africa! by Andrew Lewis Conn; So Much a Part of You by Polly Dugan; Stars Go Blue by Laura Pritchett; Third Rail by Rory Flynn; and Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejide.
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“I learned to look outward more”
“There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment,” says former Poetry editor Christian Wiman, who now teaches at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. “Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist.”
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Welcome to the Book Tour
Our own Emily St. John Mandel gives a glimpse of her life on the road. “I’d been on tour for so long that I had to take a picture of my hotel room door every time I checked into a new place, because otherwise I’d forget my room number,” she writes. For more of her writing, check out her Millions essay on the place where writers work.
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