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
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The King of Horror’s Poetry
“Perhaps this is why King favors prose—many of his novels and stories confront terror so enormous it transcends poetic language.” In Poetry Foundation, an essay about Stephen King‘s little known literary habit: writing poetry. Pair with: our editor Lydia Kiesling on discovering America through King’s novels.
Party in the City Where the Book Fair’s On
South Florida readers! Assuming you’re done voting by now, you should make next week’s Miami Book Fair International a priority. Afterward, you can go celebrate thirty years of Books & Books, the jewel of Coral Gables. (And perhaps to warm up for it all, you can read my review of Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood.)
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So, You Want to Manage a Lit Mag
In a timely article for recent graduates, The Missouri Review’s managing editor Michael Nye tells the story of how he came to steward one of the most interesting literary magazines in the country. Spoiler alert: it’s important that you like reading.
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Happy Baby Shower
The Rumpus’s Stephen Elliott is using Kickstarter to raise money for the film adaptation of his novel Happy Baby. However you could also fund the project in a more three dimensional plane by attending November 29th’s Fundraising Party (which we’re co-sponsoring!). The party will include comedy by Eugene Mirman and readings by Jami Attenberg and Rick Moody.
Together
Writing a novel together might seem like a recipe for conflict, but Gavin Kovite and Christopher Robinson, who co-wrote War of the Encyclopaedists together, argue the exercise ended up deepening their longtime friendship. At Salon, they explain why.
Jean Craighead George Passes Away
Celebrated author Jean Craighead George passed away this week at the age of 92. George published more than 100 books throughout her career, often focusing on the environment and the natural world, most famously in My Side of the Mountain and in her Newbery Medal-winner, Julie of the Wolves.
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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.