It looks like Jonathan Safran Foer will be publishing his first novel in eleven years next fall. The book, tentatively titled Here I Am, is the story of an American Jewish family, set against a background of traumatic events in the Middle East including earthquakes and an invasion of Israel. Foer’s last novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, enjoyed tremendous critical and commercial success. Here’s a piece on JSF’s crazy, confusing, die-cut book Tree of Codes.
Extremely Patient and Incredibly Careful
The Commuter
The New York Times wants to know what you’re reading on the subway. (via.)
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Skateboarding’s Art and Craft
Joel Rice‘s “Flip” column for McSweeney’s discusses the culture of skateboarding. This week he interviews Cole Louison, author of The Impossible: Rodney Mullen, Ryan Sheckler, and the Fantastic History of Skateboarding.
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Type Wars
For everyone who likes typography and arguments, New York Magazine has a story up that covers the type designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones and follows the pair through their success to their ultimate rift. For those who prefer debates with more immediate impact, Mental Floss has a breakdown of the best shots fired in the fight over the Oxford Comma.
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Tom Bissell Turns Pop
How writer Tom Bissell has pulled up some literary roots (think The Father of All Things) to begin staking out territory in pop culture (Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter).
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Talking Covers
What does Jonathan Franzen think of the cover for Freedom? What about Charlotte Strick, the book’s designer? Or the photographers that took photos of those trees, of that blue warbler? Talking Covers has collected their thoughts, and plays host to other cover-related conversations besides. Check out this one The Flame Alphabet.
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That Which I Love
Recommended Reading: This jarring, surreal “amalgamation of three different pieces” on Hannah Arendt by Bobbi Lurie over at 3:AM Magazine. Arendt, herself a political theorist, would likely have appreciated this piece from The Millions on the life and afterlife of literary theory.
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Links for Literary Aspirations
If you have aspirations of the literary sort, I strongly recommend Dan Wickett’s interview with “founders, editors and managing editors of 8 Literary Journals of varying age and size.” And you should also look at the latest posts at Mad Max Perkins’ Book Angst in which hears from editors and publishing industry types about “the true meaning of midlist.”
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Our most insufferable novelist strikes again! Apparently he is taking a break from crafting masterpieces on the side of fast food cups and lecture-shaming people who like burgers to focus on his first love: pretentious, preposterous fiction. Hey, perhaps he will figure out a way to reduce the long bloody history of the Middle East into a cutesy flip book like he did for 9/11! That would be so precious.
Seriously, why do sites like the Millions prop up writers like this? “Tremendous critical success”? That book was excoriated. It’s perhaps the worst book of the millennium. I repeat: It ends with a fucking flip book depicting someone falling from the towers on 9/11. The polite, whitewashed lit culture of today is really wreaking havoc on the quality of our literature. I suppose, like anything, it’s about money: J4 sells, so the Millions covers him so it can sell ads. Sigh. Quality is an afterthought these days; first and foremost concern is keeping the machine well-oiled and profitable.
The Millions used to be good but now it’s barely more than a PR extension of the buttoned-up corporate publishing industry. Another one bites the dust…see ya!
I dunno, I really like Everything is Illuminated, scenes from which stay with me years later. Haven’t read the others so can’t speak to them, but I found him to be funny, touching, and very readable in my o book sampling. Different strokes, I guess.