Recommended Reading: Marci Shore on reading Tony Judt’s Postwar in modern Ukraine.
Post-Maidan
“Banned Books Through History”
This week in book-related infographics: A look at “Banned Books Through History.”
New Miranda July Work on the Way
Welcome news for Miranda July fans: she tweeted this week that she’s finished work on her debut novel, The First Bad Man. The book will publish in January 2015.
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A Literary BuzzFeed
BuzzFeed is launching an Emerging Writer’s Fellowship, complete with $12,000 stipend, and Saeed Jones, whose poetry collection Prelude to Bruise was released last year, will be their new Literary Editor. Electric Literature talked to Jones about digital journalism, the need for diversity in writing and publishing, and what he’s looking for in Fellowship applicants.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Franzen, Binet, Baldwin, Müller
A new collection of non-fiction by Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away: Essays, is out today. Also out is Laurent Binet’s HHhH, from which we recently published some redacted scenes. Other new releases this week include Rosecrans Baldwin’s memoir Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down and Nobel laureate Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel.
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Of the Tribe
More than ever, we need literature that gives Westerners a compelling entrée into—a way of better understanding—the lives of war-and-terrorism fraught regions. Over at Bloom, T.L. Khleif, recent recipient of a Rona Jaffe award, writes about Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon, a collection that immerses readers in the tribal areas of Pakistan prior to the rise of the Taliban. Among other notable honors, Ahmad joins the pantheon of late-blooming male authors who would not have ever published were it not for the stubborn encouragement of their wives.
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The Road to Progress
Over at Full Stop, Sean Minogue argues that social media can have a positive influence on a writer’s creative development. He mentions Twitter extraordinaire Teju Cole, who thinks his involvement in online discussions “comes from the non-American part of me which is saying that novelists in every other country, with the exception of the American or the Anglo-American sphere, actually consider it part of their work to engage.” Pair with our piece on the best of literary Twitter.
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