One downside to being an internationally acclaimed author is that people care an awful lot about digging into your past. Haruki Murakami has found this out the hard way, as a librarian from Kobe High School (which Murakami attended during his younger years) has made public a list of books checked out by then-budding author. For more “Murakami meets library,” here’s a review of his own The Strange Library.
The Young Library
Curiosities
Friend of The Millions, proprietor of Pinky’s Paperhaus, and all around great gal Carolyn Kellogg has landed at the LA Times book blog Jacket Copy. We have little doubt that she’ll do great things there.Following Heath Ledger’s untimely death, BBC looks at the myriad ways in which Hollywood has dealt with losing an actor mid-production, dating back to 1937 “when Jean Harlow died, aged 26, during the making of Saratoga. With filming 90% complete, a lookalike and two Harlow sound-a-likes (voice doubles) took up where the star left off.”Bookride is back with an intriguing look at the collectors’ market for Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. Don’t miss this tidbit: “By the way sending books to authors for signing is something of a gamble – Thomas Hardy used to keep all the books sent to him neatly shelved in a spare room.”Speaking of Garcia Marquez, Edith Grossman, the translator who has shaped the Latin American canon for English speakers over the last few decades, is profiled in bookforum.The New Republic offers the story behind the controversial New York Times John McCain/lobbyist story.The Morning News returns with its third annual Tournament of Books. Sadly, there will be no Bloggers’ Pool this year (despite our being eager to participate again), but Coudal Partners is sponsoring a betting pool for charity this year. As of this writing, On Chesil Beach and Run have had the most money thrown their way.A cartoon drawn on the pages of Moby DickAnd finally, McSweeney’s offers up some sweet Ashton Kutcher fan fiction.
●
●
The Cartoon Curator
Didn’t find the latest New Yorker cartoon funny? Take it up with The New Yorker‘s cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, who discusses the magazine’s “idea drawings” and humor in his TED talk, Anatomy of a New Yorker Cartoon. Bonus: check out Mankoff’s favorite New Yorker cartoons.
No Lie
“One lie I tell is that we care, generally—human beings—about each other. We could not, I tell myself in the moments just before the night’s dark hour, create The Odyssey or King Lear or Thomas and Beulah without a profound sense of The Other. Surely, were it true this thing’s a joke, nothing more, and a cruel one at that, we’d have no Dickinson, no Yeats, no freakin’ Rumi, read by Bly, loud on an old tape deck while I shower.” Pablo Tanguay on the art of lying.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Modiano; Krasznahorkai; Hua; Franklin; Gleick; Springsteen
Out this week: The Black Notebook by Patrick Modiano; The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai; Deceit and Other Possibilities by Vanessa Hua; Shirley Jackson by Ruth Franklin; Time Travel: A History by James Gleick; and Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
●
●
The Barbarian Nurseries to be a Film?
Héctor Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries is being developed into a movie, reports Edward Douglas for ComingSoon. (You can read an excerpt of the book over here.) Elsewhere, you can read Tobar’s take on how “the writer is a revered figure in France.”
●
●
Robert M. Pirsig Dead at 88
Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, died today at the age of 88, according to a statement released by his publisher. Pirsig’s work explored a system of thought called the “Metaphysics of Quality,” which has been defined as “a thesis that quality is the basis of reality, and that this understanding unifies most East Asian and Western thought.”
Wikileaks, Bookshelf Voyeur
Quartz has a roundup of the books Hillary Clinton borrowed from the State Department library during her time as Secretary of State, including a memoir, poetry, and a lot of non-fiction. Pair with our piece about what private libraries reveal about their readers.