It might sound weird, but Jon Methven McSweeney’s really wishes you would tell him how he did with your egg whites and avocado wrap.
According to What’s Trending
Holden Caulfield Has No Friends
Chances are you’ve heard that in a recent interview, Claire Messud responded to a patronizing question about one of her characters — “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?” — by giving her interviewer a smackdown that resonated across the blogosphere. At Page-Turner, several authors (including Rivka Galchen, Jonathan Franzen and Year in Reading alumna Margaret Atwood) offer their own takes on the matter of “likeability.” (There’s also this piece by our own Emily St. John Mandel to consider.)
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Tuesday New Rease Day: Nesbø, Tillman
Jo Nesbø has a new noir from the North this week, The Leopard. Also out: Richard Nash’s Red Lemonade continues to re-release the backlist of Millions favorite Lynne Tillman; this week it’s Motion Sickness and No Lease on Life.
Hierarchy of Book Publishing: The Top 100
Knopf publicity bigwig Paul Bogaards kindly plunked us onto his Hierarchy of Book Publishing: The Top 100. We’d note that we’re run out of basements throughout the NY-metro area (and not just NJ), but we’re too busy telling the Stieg Larsson estate to eat our dust.
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PDT Cocktail Book
With New Year’s Eve looming, LA Weekly is forgoing their usual cookbook of the week in favor of a cocktail book—The PDT Cocktail Book by Jim Meehan and illustrator Chris Gall, the only beverage book that made it into their Best of 2011 “cookbook” list.
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Dude You’re Ready
“I started zoning out a little. My eyes drifted over toward my cat. Mr. Patterson pulled me right back in by saying, ‘Once you have the outline, start writing dude, you’re ready.’ It was that dude that woke me.” At The Awl, Patrick Hoffman reviews James Patterson’s MasterClass on writing. Pair with Bill Morris‘s account of losing his Pattersonian virginity at 32,000 feet.
Not Quite a Review
“This is a tricky novel to review. I’m not even sure it is a novel. And I’m not certain as to whether its fragmentary nature belies an organic structure of astutely sewn intention or is merely a disingenuous device to conceal a let’s-get-something-out cobbling together of unpublished material lying around the writer’s desk. What I can tell you is this: I was powerfully engaged and richly entertained by Sergio De La Pava’s Personae.” (Related: our own Garth Risk Hallberg wrote a profile of De La Pava.)
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RIP MCA
Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch AKA MCA has died at 47, due to cancer. Pitchfork has more.
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Space Oddity
How does copyright work in space? Everyone’s favorite Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield learned the hard way.
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