“Lovecraft Country doesn’t just race along, it tears, demanding that you keep turning its pages without interruption. I read the second half of the book while walking in my neighborhood, holding the book with one hand and clutching bags of groceries in the other, and then finishing up in bed with a small LED lamp after my wife had fallen asleep. It’s one of those books.” Cory Doctorow reviews Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country at BoingBoing.
Entering Lovecraft Country
“He’s too good-looking”
Surely you’ve heard the hype by now. Surely you’ve seen someone blushing and shifting their eyes askance while reading this book in public. Well, now you can get a taste of what the fuss is all about. You can read the beginning of Alissa Nutting’s Tampa courtesy of Dzanc Books and The Collagist.
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Pixar Concept Art Released
Pixar got the 2013 film buzz started early by sending out four images of concept art to ComingSoon.net prior to New Year’s Day. The artwork provides teaser images of films in the pipeline through 2016.
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The Great Terry Castle
“Much of what passes for advanced literary scholarship these days is dreadful twaddle — incoherent, emotionally empty, deeply illiterate,” says Terry Castle in a recent interview with Salon about her new book of essays, The Professor. You can also catch Castle in the most recent issue of The New York Times Magazine.
Pushed Out of View
Over at The Guardian, Charlotte Jones takes issue with the recently announced sequel of Pride and Prejudice. The book by Terri Fleming will focus on the life of Mary Bennett, a character who is deliberately neglected by Jane Austen. As Jones puts it, “Lizzie only has space in the book for a remarkable interior life because her sisters do not. Even beautiful Jane is a bit insipid – a fact Austen knowingly plays with, as her eventual engagement to Bingley is briefly threatened by Jane’s reticence.”
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Lewis on the Economy
While on the publicity tour for his latest book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, Michael Lewis stops by NPR‘s “Fresh Air” to talk Greece, the Euro, California’s “third world problems,” and the Occupy Wall Street protests. The author also gets a nice write-up in the latest New York Magazine, and his interview on last night’s “The Daily Show” ran so long, they had to put the full version online. (Start “The Daily Show”‘s clip at ~21:50 for the interview.)
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A Classic of the Future
“The thriller, set in a dystopian future where women and girls can kill men with a single touch, was the favourite on a shortlist that included former winner Linda Grant and Man Booker-shortlisted Madeleine Thien.” Naomi Alderman’s The Power has become the first speculative work to nab the Baileys prize for women’s fiction, reports The Guardian, noting that the judges said Alderman’s book would be “a classic of the future.” See also: a few years back we highlighted a collaboration between Alderman and Year in Reading alum Margaret Atwood, a comic zombie novel that you can still read in its entirety here.
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