For The Guardian, Richard Lea investigates the fine line between fiction and nonfiction writing, a boundary that is drawn most firmly in the anglophone world. Pair with this Millions piece in defense of blurring the lines of fiction and autobiography.
The Made-up Divide
Collapsing Genre
"The clash of genre values is fundamental to the novelistic experience. That’s how we ought to be thinking about our books. Instead of asking whether a comic book could be “as valuable” as King Lear, we ought to ask how the values of tragedy and romance might collide." Joshua Rothman writes about the coming "collapse of the genre system" and our own Emily St. John Mandel's National Book Award short-listed Station Eleven for The New Yorker.
Amazon’s First-Half Top 10
Amazon has named its Best Books of 2010... So Far (that's January through June).
●
●
The Lines Between Us
“Think of landscape. Think of how elements come to be attached to one another, how it’s impossible to separate the road from the field, the field from the tree, the tree from the water, the water from the sky. We cannot attribute natural features to the lines we design just as we cannot attribute natural causes to those dying as they try to cross them.” For Tin House, Portuguese writer Susana Moreira Marques meditates on the concept of borders and Wolf Böwig’s photography project, “Borders and Beyond.”
Uncommon Thrills
In the Times Book Review, Year in Reading alum and Edinburgh author Alexander Chee reviews Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, a Millions contributor. He describes the book as, among other things, a departure from your average literary thriller: “If we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now.”
Joyce Works for Google
"The company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed... It is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones. If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google." From The Guardian, a look at "fiction in the age of data saturation," with a healthy dose of anthropology thrown in just for fun.
●
●
Booker Prize Shortlist Odds
With the Booker Prize shortlist out, the bookies have updated the odds. Tom McCarthy's C emerges as the new favorite and Peter Carey and Andrea Levy are surprising long shots.
●
●