Yesterday, one of my Curiosities included a link to an old Millions review of AM Homes’s domestically disturbing novel May We Be Forgiven. Today, she has a great new story over at The Guardian just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Be Mine
Tuesday New Release Day: Waldman, Kline
A pair of debuts are making waves this week. Amy Waldman’s The Submission ponders an alternate present in which a Muslim man is the anonymous winner of the search for a design to build the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero. Ernest Kline’s Player One is a “genre-busting,” pop culture-infused take on the virtual reality future that awaits us.
Kids These Days
“The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years,” says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning.
Writing is excessive drudgery.
Over on the Atlantic there’s a compendium of cheeky marginalia Monks and their scribes have scribbled into gilded manuscripts, courtesey of Lapham’s Quarterly.
●
●
A Tale of Two Daredevils
In The Guardian, our own Mark O’Connell reviews TransAtlantic, the new novel by Year in Reading alum Colum McCann. If you’ll recall, we featured the book in our Great 2013 Book Preview.
Introducing/A New Feature
Good news, Twitter poets! The Goddess of 140 Characters decided to let us tweet line breaks. (h/t Slate)
●
●
Not My Best Work
In the early eighties, when the writer James Lasdun was working in publishing, he rejected a book by a writer who turned out to be a pen name for Doris Lessing. The fallout? He couldn’t bring himself to read her work until this year. (Related: our own Mark O’Connell’s interview with Lasdun about his latest book.)
●
●