Jenn Shapland had the pleasure of cataloguing the archives of Carson McCullers, Gertrude Stein, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Their possessions left her with a few lingering questions. Pair with Shapland’s piece on cataloguing David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.
Questions from the Archives
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.
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Song of Herself
Does she contradict herself? Very well, then she contradicts herself, she is large, she contains multitudes! Is Sarah Palin the Walt Whitman of Wasilla?
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Life on Mars
Just another sign of the apocalypse: Sydney, Australia goes red.
End Notes from the Master
University students: I double dog dare you to use this David Foster Wallace end note generator to pad out your next term paper’s citations.
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“Because I speak in tongues”
Friday would have been Ray Bradbury’s 94th birthday, which is why Dan Piepenbring, at The Paris Review Daily, looked back on one of Bradbury’s classic stories and picked out some choice quotes from his Art of Fiction interview. Piepenbring also pointed out that the story gets a mention in, among other places, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. You could supplement this by reading Tanjil Rashid on the author’s Middle East connection.
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Miranda July Steals
“I discovered that stealing required a loose, casual energy,” writes Miranda July. “A sort of oneness with the environment, like surfing or horse-whispering.”
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The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Looks like you might want to add Noah Hawley’s new suspense novel Before the Fall to your reading list — this review by the New York Times is effusive in its praise. Check out the other side of what a Times review can do and pair it with this review of Laura Tillman’s The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts, which includes such lines as: “Is a book without judgment, a personal view and confidence in its validity still a book?”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Green; Simsion; Harrison; Israel; Enniss
New this week: Saving Grace by Jane Green; The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion; The Bishop’s Wife by Mette Ivie Harrison; The Global War on Morris by Steve Israel; and After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon by Stephen Enniss.