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
Lydia Davis, Ctd.
Last year, I pointed readers to Numero Cinq, a new Canadian lit mag with a notably memorable tagline. In the latest issue, which is split into seventeen parts, Benjamin Woodard talks with Lydia Davis about her Flaubert translation, her new story collection and the art of writing while traveling. (h/t The Rumpus)
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This Glorious Respite
“It is now, at this precise moment when I become woefully aware of the cruel transience of this seasonal offering, rarely lingering beyond the Marigold blooms of latter March, and at once I am lost amidst a magnificent vision, one in which our hallowed Saint Patrick himself is riding shotgun alongside me in this very Camry.” In which James Joyce orders a shamrock milkshake.
U.S. History Textbooks or J.K. Rowling’s Magic
Over at Indian Country Today Media Network, read a statement in response to the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling’s History of Magic in North America. “What matters here, folks, in this debate over J.K. Rowling’s latest work is the language society uses – the language that is still taught to kids in schools today about Native Americans and our spiritualities.”
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Patty and Walter, anyone?
In The New York Times Magazine, Heather Havrilesky cautions against “The Divorce Delusion,” or one of modern drama’s most unrealistic tropes. “Infidelity, a love child (or two), dalliances with prostitutes, lewd online behavior; we’ve watched so many spouses bounce back from hell,” she writes, “that maybe we’re beginning to believe that there’s no trauma so great that it can’t be quickly metabolized into a courageous determination to sally forth against the storm.”
A Wrinkle in Time to Become a Film
Childhood readers and lovers of A Wrinkle in Time, rejoice! It may finally become a full-length movie, with a screenplay written by Jennifer Lee of Frozen fame.
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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.