Year in Reading alum Catie Disabato sits down with 0s&1s to discuss “using criticism as fuel, ambition, comparisons to Ayn Rand, the power of pop stars, happiness norms & more.” You could also read our review of her latest work, The Ghost Network.
Thick Skin
Best So Far
What’s the best book of the 21st century? To date, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao seems to be the favorite – the BBC polled a few dozen US critics and Junot Diaz‘s novel came in first place. The full list is available from The Guardian, and includes Zadie Smith‘s White Teeth and Michael Chabon‘s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, both of which appeared alongside Oscar Wao in our own “Best of the Millennium” list a few years ago.
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On Ruined Pianos and Literary Fêtes
The Paris Review will soon move into a new office space, and while preparing for the relocation, some staffers discovered “a batch of small, white booklets” entitled “The Paris Review: Twenty Year Index, Issues 1-56.” The lists seemed to indicate everything that had been published in the magazine during its first 23 years of existence, and they also featured an introduction from founder George Plimpton – an introduction, by the way, that really depicts the Review of old better than any photograph ever could.
Wordpocalypse
In the beginning, God died, and it was bad. Then the pun died too, and despair came over the people.
One Translation To Rule Them All
“Despite a glut of English translations (well over a hundred, by my count),” writes Dante scholar Robert Pogue Harrison, “New versions of the entire [Divine Comedy] poem or individual canticles continue to appear in rapid succession—six in the last decade alone.” Over at the New York Review of Books, he investigates three of the latest: Dan Brown’s Inferno, Mary Jo Bang’s Inferno, and Clive James’s Divine Comedy.
Choking Hazard
Check out new fiction from You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine author Alexandra Kleeman.
Custodian of Forgotten Books
Recommended Reading: On Brad Bigelow, a “Custodian of Forgotten Books.” Our own Claire Cameron traces the history of John Williams’s Stoner, which was first published in 1965 and became a bestseller in the Netherlands in 2013.
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