Is Alejandro Zambra the new great Latin American writer? James Wood thinks he is. In the latest New Yorker, he describes how Zambra’s new story collection alerted him to the writer’s oeuvre, going on to analyze all three of the writer’s novels in English. You could also read our 2011 interview with Zambra.
Brillante
Thursday Links
Mr. Sarvas aka TEV takes another turn in the limelight, this time in the Jewish Journal.Of course this story comes from a local TV news site: Pornographic comic books sold on Wal-Mart, Target web sites. Film at 11!Five things about children's book awards from a Michigan point of view."Digital textbooks can save college students hundreds of dollars every semester, but the market is off to an unimpressive start."A charming remembrance of Ryszard Kapuscinski by writer Andrew Nagorski.
Linguistics
Leave it to the Oxford English Dictionary folks to put a damper on the linsane amount of eponyms based on Jeremy Lin's surname.
Felt Time
"As phenomenological philosophy has determined, self-consciousness is not a mental state that is added on to our experience, or that is particular; rather, it is a feature inherent in all experience. My perception contains me." Send your Sunday into an existential tailspin with German psychologist Marc Wittmann and his heady ideas about the notion of time and consciousness.
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Not Ideal
"The most unfortunate / Thing about history / Is not pornos. No, it is how Americans / (And we were talking about men but may I take this opportunity / To be more inclusive, because inclusivity is in!) were once better than they are at present." In which an imagined David Brooks writes a sestina about misogyny. Here's a Millions piece in which the real-life Brooks is thought of not as a pariah, but as a harbinger of hope.
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What Makes the Pages Turn?
Recommended Reading: Do we read books for the plot or the characters?
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Ferlinghetti’s Journals Forthcoming
95-year-old Lawrence Ferlinghetti plans to publish his travel journals in September 2015, reports SFGate. The journals should cover his experience as a submarine chaser in World War II through his doctoral studies at the Sorbonne, as well as his travels through Central and South America later on.