This week, Football Book Club will be reading Brain Fever by Kimiko Hahn and posting essays about Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio — its selection from last week — and life without the NFL. Brain Fever is the 10th book of poetry from Hahn, who won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and an American Book Award in 2008 and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010.
Football Book Club: Kimiko Hahn’s ‘Brain Fever’
“David Shields = Canada”
At HTML Giant, Catherine Lacey interviews David Shields, who says that his new book, How Literature Saved My Life, drew material from his stated identity as a “highly self-conscious lab rat.” For more, you can read our own Mark O’Connell’s review of his book in the Times.
●
●
Cheating and a Happy Marriage
In The Secret Lives of Wives, more than two hundred women reveal to Iris Krasnow how they keep their relationships together, from separate vacations to “boyfriend with boundaries.”
●
●
Ping-ping-ping
Back in July, Evan Allgood interviewed Alina Simone for The Millions. The writer and indie rocker talked about her new book and the phenomenon of “gilded turds” in the art world. Now, at Full-Stop, Jordan Kisner conducts his own interview with Simone, who tells him that “we’re in this age where every three seconds you’re getting pinged by some weird ‘ask’ that is almost like an invitation to a new life.”
Bully Pulpit
Speaking of France: whether or not you find him disagreeable, Michel Houellebecq is pretty much guaranteed to elicit an emotional response from readers. His new opinion piece in The New York Times is no different. Here’s a review of Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory that refers to him as a “petty misanthrope.”
●
●
Taming the Land
David Gessner thinks Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey are more relevant than they’ve ever been. Why? Their stories about the West anticipated the California drought. At Salon, Gessner explains why, among other things, Stegner spent much of his life debunking Western individualism.
●
●