A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is scooping up award nominations left and right. Given the relative heaping of praise, it’s interesting to hear a dissenting voice. This review from the London Review of Books offers us just that. If it’s more Yanagihara you’re after, here she is in a recent interview for The Millions.
Ostentatiously Withholding Information?
The State of the State’s Libraries
The state funds for California’s libraries have been dwindling for the better part of a decade, but now they face total elimination. Put into concrete terms: in the 1999-2000 fiscal year, libraries received $56.8 million from the state; in the 2008-2009 fiscal year, that number was down to $12.9 million; now they’ll receive $0.
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The Animated ‘Aeneid’
Mark Robinson makes a case for the Aeneid in a vivid animated video that explains how the epic poem was published despite Virgil's wishes.
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The Great Silence
“I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?” New short fiction from Ted Chiang over at Electric Literature (and introduced by Year in Reading alum Karen Jay Fowler)! Pair with our encyclopedic survey of primate lit.
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Authentic Explanations
For Public Books, Matthew Clair considers authoritative black knowledge in intellectual practices and “the logic of racial authenticity,” which “stipulates both that black intellectuals have a particular responsibility to represent, in both senses of that word, ‘their’ people, and that, as racial insiders, they are uniquely capable of doing so.”
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Coldplay Loves Libraries
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All the Free Books Fit to Download
The new year ushered in more than soon-to-be-broken resolutions. This January 1, a vast cache of works released in 1923 entered the public domain—including tens of thousands of books. Here’s how to download them for free, and here’s what all this means for publishers and readers alike. Happy hunting.
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The Sleepy Short Story
Recommended Reading: Louise Erdrich’s new short story in The New Yorker, “The Big Cat,” which is about snoring among other things. “The women in my wife’s family all snored, and when we visited for the holidays every winter I got no sleep.” Deborah Treisman also interviewed Erdrich about the story. “I like the idea that this story reads like a fairy tale, but there is no moral at all, unless it’s Beware of Snoring Cats. Nothing I write ever has a moral.”
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Edan Lepucki’s Other People Pod
Our own Edan Lepucki sits down with Brad Listi for an Other People Podcast. If for nothing else, listen to them discuss Facebook addiction. Their discussion starts around the eleven minute mark. (P.S. you should also check out both Edan and Brad’s Year in Reading posts.)
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