What can we learn about Leo Tolstoy by reading the German sociologist Max Weber? Let Jeremy Klemin from 3:AM Magazine explain. While we’re on Tolstoy, here’s a complementary piece that asks the age old question–who’s better: Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky?
War and Sociology
Questioning Your Legacy
John Steinbeck's son criticizes the state of Texas for invoking Of Mice and Men's Lennie Small, in ruling that certain mentally retarded individuals can be sentenced to the death penalty. The great-great-great granddaughter of Herman Melville wonders where her great-great-great-grandfather's editor was when he wrote Moby Dick.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Sayles, Mieville, Theroux, Habila, Drabble, Donoghue, Cronin
The huge, McSweeney's-published, John Sayles novel A Moment in the Sun has been getting great reviews. It's now out. Also new this week is China Mieville's Embassytown, reviewed here today; Paul Theroux's exploration of the genre of travel writing, The Tao of Travel; prizewinning Nigerian author Helon Habila's new novel Oil on Water; and A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, the complete stories of Margaret Drabble, recently written up by Joyce Carol Oates in the New Yorker. New in paperback are a pair of Millions Hall of Famers, Emma Donoghue's Room and Justin Cronin's The Passage.
Cursing at Poets
At The Collagist, Kyle Beachy imagines the emperor Augustus saying to the poet Horace, "You and your kind are fucked!" "The Extent of Our Decline" is one of number of essays appearing in the collection I co-edited, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, coming in March from Soft Skull.
●
●
Against the “Literary”
Rob Horning doesn’t like the word “literary.” Not one bit.
New Novel from David Mitchell
David Mitchell fans, good news! The author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas will publish a new novel called Slade House this coming October. Even better? It's based on his short-story-via-Twitter, "The Right Sort," which The Millions first collected and published.
●
●
The Opposite of Slouching
“Aspiring journalists tend to worship at the altar of Joan Didion,” writes Heather Havrilesky (who some of you may know as Polly) in the latest issue of Bookforum. The fact that so many writers look up to Didion as an example necessitates that the lit world find at least one offbeat alternative. In Havrilesky's eyes, that alternative is obvious: the late Nora Ephron was the anti-Didion, she argues.
‘The scent is, in a word, newsy’
The New York Times, now available in scented candle form.
●
●