Over at Longreads, you can read the first chapter of Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night – one of the most anticipated books of 2016.
An Encounter with a Stranger
“Aaliyah would have been on Twitter”
HTMLGIANT interviews Patricia Lockwood, Twitter’s “Poet Laureate“.
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Castellanos Moya on the Bolaño Bubble, Part Two
Horacio Castellanos Moya, the author of Senselessness [review], again tackles the commodification of Roberto Bolaño, this time in a lengthy piece in Guernica. “It’s the landlords of the market,” he writes, “who decide the mambo that you dance.”
Lateral Moves
What happens when a literary fiction writer tackles YA? If that writer is Sherman Alexie, he produces an award-winning book that rivals the quality of his books in other genres. At the Ploughshares blog, Annie Cardi writes about writers who’ve made this transition, including Alexie, Roddy Doyle and Louise Erdrich. You could also read our survey of high school students on the best YA books of 2013.
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Lydia Davis, in Short
The Village Voice offers a pretty good briefing on the charms of Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories are out this week.
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“It’s a process that doesn’t stop.”
An in depth interview with Chris Andrews on the subject of translating Roberto Bolaño and César Aira.
Bully Pulpit
Speaking of France: whether or not you find him disagreeable, Michel Houellebecq is pretty much guaranteed to elicit an emotional response from readers. His new opinion piece in The New York Times is no different. Here’s a review of Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory that refers to him as a “petty misanthrope.”
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