Next year marks the 20th anniversary of David Foster Wallace‘s Infinite Jest. To celebrate, Little, Brown is holding a cover design contest, with a $1,000 grand prize. Also, you know, the pride of seeing Infinite Jest published in your cover. Whatever, no big deal.
Redesigning Infinite Jest
Tuesday New Release Day
Just in time for today's Booker announcement, a pair of shortlisters are now (or will be tomorrow) available stateside: In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut and The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson. Ian Frazier's big travelogue (generously excerpted in the New Yorker) Travels in Siberia is out, as is Adam Levin's massive The Instructions from McSweeney's. Three more: Djibouti by Elmore Leonard, How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu, and a gorgeous Library of America edition of "six novels in woodcuts" by pioneering graphic novelist Lynd Ward.
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Tweeting with Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan has a new story, "Black Box," which is being published in ten installments over the New Yorker Fiction Twitter feed. Beginning last night at 8pm EST, and the story continues tonight at the same time.
TQC Launches E-Book Series
The Quarterly Conversation is kicking off its new "Long Essays" e-book series with Lady Chatterley's Brother: Why Nicholson Baker Can't Write About Sex, and Why Javier Marias Can.
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Voting is open for the 3QD Prize
Voting is open for the 3 Quarks Daily Literature Prize! We are proud to tell you that nine essays from The Millions have been nominated, alongside over 50 other worthy contenders. Take a look, and don't forget to cast your vote!
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Incredibly Big and Extremely Close
"I have a big global voice, but a small local one, because I don’t want to be a target, and resent that in 2017, that’s still the only choice I get to have. I have a rule of leaving the party, or social space as soon as I see five white people drunk, because the only person who will remember that moment when everybody got hella racist will be me. I have a self-imposed curfew of when to ride my bike home, when to leave the park. I would rather risk my life riding late at night on the empty and mostly dark greenway, than riding on the street with Police officers looking for whoever matches a description." A Brief History of Seven Killings author Marlon James writes on Facebook (?) about being big, close, and black in the U S of A. Pair with Kaulie Lewis on reading James's The Book of Night Women during her senior year.
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America the Beautiful in Books
"Now I wrote until near dawn, wanting a map of the literary nation, a beautiful evocation of how we are truly a nation of village and city and prairie and brownstone, of Rockies and bayous and mesas. Novels give to every reader someone else’s home. Can we not see this – we of wonder and grievance?" Susan Straight creates a map of America in 737 novels, prompting us to remember the perennial literary question: What is the greatest American novel?
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Tell Shorter Stories
"The real world is massive and chaotic beyond the scope of any story, but the novel has always been the storytelling medium that could come closest to capturing it. And the novels that dared to really try – from Hugo to Tolstoy – are often the ones that have endured." That's not to say, of course, that bigger is always better, and in an article for The Guardian Damien Walter argues against the current glut of epic, serialized fantasy novels taking their cues from George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. As Walter puts it, "There are great fantasy short stories, novellas and single novels that deserve much wider audiences, but are sidelined by the industry’s unhealthy fixation with the serial format. It’s time for the fantasy genre to tell some new – shorter – stories."
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