The Portable Story Series is accepting submissions to their inaugural contest, judged by Year in Reading alumna Kate Christensen. The theme is hunger, the genre is fiction, the word count is 2000-4000 words, and the deadline is March 28, 2016. The contest benefits three charitable organizations.
Story Time
Praise for Emily St. John Mandel’s The Singer’s Gun
The Los Angeles Times loves Emily St. John Mandel's latest novel The Singer's Gun.
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Michael Chabon, Punk
Before he was Michael Chabon the novelist he was Michael Chabon the punk musician. Now recordings of his work with The Bats are available online as part of Mind Cure Records archival series.
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A Book, Not a Blog. About (but not) Adoption.
Matthew Salesses, whose forthcoming novel-in-stories I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying (excerpt here) will publish in February, has started writing a book (on Tumblr) “(not) about adoption.” As Salesses notes in the blog’s first post, his new project “is not to be a memoir, or an op-ed, or a travel narrative, or an answer to anyone …This is to be the story of finding out.”
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Kitty Lit
If you find cat hair in a book you checked out of the Novorossiysk Library, don't worry. It belongs to the newest librarian. Kuzya the cat started off as a pet at the Russian library but was promoted after patronage increased due to his presence. The new library assistant even wears a bow tie.
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This Post Reads Like Mad Libs.
Roz Chast, whose cartoons have been mainstays in the New Yorker for quite some time, has teamed up with Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields to write a book about the 101 two-letter words allowed in Scrabble.
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As American as Borscht
Nabokov once described himself “as American as April in Arizona,” which is an odd thing to call yourself when you’re a lepidopterist Russian expat. In Nabokov in America, Robert Roper explores why Nabokov felt he was so American, and how his journey to that identity influenced his writing of Lolita. At The Literary Review, Ian Sansom reviews Roper's book.
Crime and Punishment
Johnny Depp’s latest film, Black Mass, which casts the star as Whitey Bulger, hit theaters on September 18th. At Publishers Weekly, author T. J. English argues that Where the Bodies Were Buried: Whitey Bulger and the World That Made Him is necessary to the canon of literature on Bulger, even if it's the 16th book about the mobster.
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