Is your to-be-read list a little daunting? Check out some tips from BBC on how to read faster. If you’re looking for reading suggestions, check out our fiction and non-fiction previews.
Speed Reading
Possession is Nine-Tenths of the Law
The newest issue of Granta features some seriously captivating work, like this poem by Juliana Spahr and this story by Lorna Gibb, among many others. This “Possession” issue pairs well with an essay by our own Lydia Kiesling on possessing one’s own words and the narrative potential of leaked emails.
●
●
German Literature Month
Oktoberfest may be over, but the inaugural German Literature Month is just beginning. If you’re wondering what to imbibe while you sit down with The Sorrows of Young Werther, Magic Mountain, and The Clown, Melville House’s MobyLives blog has you covered.
●
●
Appropriate Today More Than Ever
For the tenth anniversary of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich has penned a new foreword and introduction which you can read here.
●
●
Football Book Club: Kimiko Hahn’s ‘Brain Fever’
This week, Football Book Club will be reading Brain Fever by Kimiko Hahn and posting essays about Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio — its selection from last week — and life without the NFL. Brain Fever is the 10th book of poetry from Hahn, who won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and an American Book Award in 2008 and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010.
●
●
Things to Clear Up
A couple months ago, Melville House published a biography of Roberto Bolaño, constructed from interviews the author gave throughout his life. At Full-Stop, Andrew Mitchell Davenport reads the biography, suggesting that the preponderance of myths about the author “makes elucidating Bolaño’s biography a moral issue.” Pair with: our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s Bolaño syllabus.
Agoraphobia
As part of his research for his recent treatise on office life, Cubed, n + 1 editor Nikil Saval looked back on his own years in an open office. In an interview with Sara Scribner, he talks about his growing awareness that it wasn’t good for his health: “It was sociable in some good senses, but also mostly not a pleasant place to be.”
●
●
Latino Book and Family Festival
Los Angeles-based readers of The Millions might be interested in this weekend’s Latino Book and Family Festival at the Cal State LA campus. Authors in attendance include Helena María Viramontes, Eduardo Santiago, and Luis J. Rodriguez, among others.