Recommended Reading: The inimitable Umberto Eco on how to travel with a salmon.
The Salmon Is Inedible
The Believer Book Award
To add to the awards lists, Believer has announced its editors’ shortlist for the Believer Book Award, which looks to acknowledge “the strongest and most underappreciated” novels of the year. The shortlist includes Danielle Dutton’s Sprawl; Kira Henehan’s Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles (reviewed for The Millions); James Hynes‘ Next, Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps (reviewed for The Millions); and Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies (reviewed here).
“Most boring meteorological significance”
Vanity Fair has an excerpt of Back to Blood in its latest issue. (Our own Nick Moran’s review of the book is worth reading before you proceed.)
Our Unhappy Marriage Will Be Revived in Paris
“I Have Inherited The Ancestral Home, But It Is Now A Burden Rather Than A Gift, Which Reminds Me Of Another Burden…The Institution Of Marriage” and every other Modernist novel ever written, via Mallory Ortberg of The Toast.
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Roaches are Red, Violets are Blue
Looking for a last minute Valentine’s gift? Well, in the words of The Bronx Zoo, “How better to express your appreciation for that special someone than to name one of the Bronx Zoo’s 58,000 Madagascar hissing cockroaches after them?”
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Prejudice and the Grotesque
Dave Griffith writes for The Paris Review about reading Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person,” an immigrant story set in the South, in the age of Islamophobia. Pair with Nick Ripatrazone’s Millions essay on teaching and learning from O’Connor.
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