Recommended Reading: This letter from The Paris Review’s Paris editor Antonin Baudry touches on everything from the surprising post-attack popularity of A Moveable Feast to Michel Houellebecq’s troublesome op-ed in the New York Times.
Joie de Vivre
“Here’s to you, old dears. You got this right, every one of you.”
Recommended Reading: Roger Angell describes life in the nineties. His nineties.
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He’s the Ragtime King / There is None Higher…
Ta-Nehisi Coates calls Doctorow sire (in his post E.L. Doctorow - Badass M.C.) Back in grad school, we just called him "The Funk Doc."
Tuesday New Release Day: Lee; Jiles; McCarthy
New this week: The Boy Who Escaped Paradise by J.M. Lee; News of the World by Paulette Jiles; and The Hollow Men by Rob McCarthy. For more on these and other new titles, go read our latest fiction and nonfiction book previews.
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Grappling with Language
“Aposiopesis: To cut short a trash-talking opponent mid-taunt by suplexing him. Can also be used in political debates.” Matt Seidel walks readers through a glossary of rhetorical wrestling terms.
What Was the Hipster?
n+1 posts several amusing excerpts from their “What Was The Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation” piece to be released in full later this month: “Like ‘douchebag,’ ‘hipster’ was a name that no one could apply to oneself. But the opportunity to call someone else a ‘douchebag’: that offered the would-be hipster a means of self-identification by a name one could say, looking outward. In the douchebag, the hipster had found its Other.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Eugenides, Hollinghurst, Kadare, Butler
One of the biggest literary releases of the year is out today, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Read the book's opening here. Another literary heavy hitter out today is The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst. One of Albanian writer Ismail Kadare's masterpieces, The Palace of Dreams, is now back in print in English, and Blake Butler's memoir Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia is now on shelves.
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Mississippi Music Issue
The Oxford American's thirteenth annual music issue is on shelves now, and it comes with a 27-track mix CD. This year, the OA folks have focused on Mississippi musicians. You can get a free sample on their website.
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