Recommended Reading: This bizarre little story by Diane Williams as recommended by Deb Olin Unferth at Electric Literature. The story can be found in Williams’ recently published collection of stories Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine.
No Slight Thing
Tuesday New Release Day: Messud, Ausubel, Hill, Sjón, Powers
New this week: The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, A Guide to Being Born by Ramona Ausubel, NOS4A2 by Joe Hill, and three newly translated books from by Icelandic author Sjón: The Blue Fox, The Whispering Muse, and From the Mouth of the Whale. New in paperback is The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers.
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Noble Things
Recommended Reading: A Public Space has new fiction from Roxane Gay, whose novel An Untamed State was recently reviewed for our site by Aboubacar Ndiaye.
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Literary Tastemaker Extraordinare
“In a new biography, The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Laura Claridge argues that Blanche Knopf was actually the more important and influential of the two Knopfs. That’s a stretch, but her book is still a long-overdue acknowledgment of the pioneering role Blanche played at a time when women were nearly invisible in the business world.” Find out more about Blanche Knopf at The New Yorker. Edan Lepucki’s 2011-2012 list on why not to self-publish is still relevant.
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Jumping Ship
How do you explain the recent “shit storm” at Granta? Let Full-Stop EIC Alex Shephard do it for you.
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Is Humbert Humbert Jewish?
“What [Vladimir] Nabokov is actually doing in Lolita is deliberately drawing on all manner of anti-Semitic propaganda, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Nazi caricatures of the Jewish ‘type,’ to create in Humbert Humbert the anti-Semitic cliché of legend, rather as, say, Chaucer draws on medieval misogynist writings to create in the figure of the Wife of Bath the archetypal shrew of his male audience’s nightmares.”
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