“My idea of the ideal literary dinner party remains locking a book under my left wrist while conveying risotto to my mouth with my right at the kitchen table.” Stacy Schiff talks literary dinner parties and more in this week’s New York Times By the Book column. Schiff’s latest, The Witches: Salem, 1692, is out this week.
Deep, Hungry Gulps
Saunders Meets DFW
Sometime Millions writer Frank Kovarik plumbs the connections between George Saunders’ recent story in The New Yorker and David Foster Wallace’s suicide.
Believe Me
There’s a certain narrative voice with an unspoken aim to exonerate the speaker from wrongdoing. It occurs in novels, though it’s most common in monologues, especially those which take up the entirety of a play. At Bookforum, Lurid and Cute author Adam Thirlwell lists a number of examples, including Hunger by Knut Hamsun and Wars I Have Seen by Gertrude Stein.
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Dickinson’s Self-Creation
“Dickinson wasn’t a madwoman, but she was maddened with rage—against a culture that had no place for a woman with her own fiercely independent mind and will.” On Emily Dickinson’s self-creation at Lit Hub. Pair with a piece on Paul Legault’s English-to-English translations of Dickinson’s poems.
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Not to be Rude
Apologies for bringing this up, but in a WaPo review of Sorry!: The English and their Manners, Jonathan Yardley points out that your average English person says “sorry” eight times a day.
Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask
At FiveChapters this week, you can read an excerpt of Sam Lipsyte’s forthcoming novel, The Ask.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Gartner, Talib, McLain, Lively
Out today are Zsuzsi Gartner’s Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, which was shortlisted for Canada’s top literary prize, and Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder bestselling expert on chaos Nassim Talib. Out in paperback: The Paris Wife by Paula McLain and How It All Began by Penelope Lively.
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Curated Book Lists
New York City’s iconic Strand bookstore features prominent authors’ curated book collections on their website. Here’s Jennifer Egan‘s. Here’s Art Spiegelman‘s.
Maya Angelou in the Kitchen
Maya Angelou's underrated cookbooks are as vibrant as her more prominent work.
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