Recommended Reading: On the mysterious benefactors keeping St. Mark’s bookstore alive.
Bookstore Fairy
2014 IMPAC Award Announced
It’s just been announced that The Sound of Things Falling by Colombian author, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated from the Spanish by Canadian Anne McLean, is the winner of the 2014 International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award (and the €100,000 prize money). We discussed the Prize’s shortlist when it was released back in 2013, and profiled The Sound of Things Falling in our “Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.” Congratulations to Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and be sure to check out his prize-winning novel!
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Sportsballers Who Love Books
It’s not often that you hear about an athlete who hosts his own book podcast, but Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck does just that, reports Yahoo News. (Also namechecked for their bibliophilic tendendies in the piece: Pats receiver Malcolm Mitchell and retired baller Donte’ Stallworth.)
In addition to the show, where Luck interviews his favorite authors, the QB also has a book club; this month’s reads are A Wrinkle in Time for rookies, i.e., kiddos, and The Soul of an Octopus for veterans, his adult participants.
“The heart belongs to the tide and the deep alone”
The upcoming Supreme Court decision on gay marriage is drawing a lot of attention. But what about the other ruling — the one aimed at grizzled old men? At The Onion, a report on Justice Alito’s recent decision, which tersely states that marriage is a pact between a man and the sea.
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Unpublished DFW
This previously unpublished David Foster Wallace story, likely an excerpt from the Pale King manuscript, circulated as samizdat a couple of years back, but its reappearance – this time on some guy’s tumblr page – is a good excuse to link to it.
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Zen State
Recommended Reading: Brett Elizabeth Jenkins’s poem “To Get to Zen” at Paper Darts. “you must first lose your/shit in an elevator/in front of a man you do not know.”
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Ice Cream Etc.
Recommended Reading: Chris Powers on the short fiction of John Updike. Pair with James Santel on Updike’s Collected Stories.
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Indie Strong
“Like actual endangered species, independent bookshops induce a fiercely protective kind of love; paradoxically, it’s often their precarity that saves them.” The Guardian profiles Philippe Ungar and Franck Bohbot, the men behind “We Are New York Indie Booksellers,” which features the 50 remaining indies in and around Manhattan. (Pair with: Janet Potter‘s history of bookstore love).
The Humanity of Books
“To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.” Digital pioneer and theorist Jaron Lanier fears that the Internet might be destroying not just literature, but also the middle class.
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