Victor Hugo, when asked about the other parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy that aren’t the widely-read Inferno, had this to say: “The human eye was not made to look upon so much light, and when the poem becomes happy, it becomes boring.” Ouch. Is this why so many of us haven’t even read Dante, despite his being a kind of cultural icon?
We Read No More
Spitting Straight Fire
“You don’t feel that most of the people in these incidents do not like black people, but simply are a product of their white supremacy and are exercising it on you without caution, care, or thought.” Solange Knowles wrote an essay and you need to read it. See also: our review of Wild Hundreds.
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How Patrick Bateman Stole Christmas
“Have you guessed who I am? Sometimes I think you have.” Is this Dr. Seuss or Bret Easton Ellis? The Awl has a quiz to see whether you can differentiate between sociopaths and the Cat in the Hat.
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A Year in Reading from The New Yorker
New Yorker contributors – including a couple of participants in our “Year in Reading” series – offer a predictably thoughtful and heterodox guide to the best books they read this year.
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Boo!
Spooky! The good folks over at The New York Times understand that there is only so much time left to bask in the eerie Halloween vibe, so they’ve put together this helpful list of the latest and best in horror fiction to help you find something suitably scary to read.
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Tough Sell
Did Patrick Modiano deserve the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature? Wrong question, our own Bill Morris writes in The Daily Beast. The right question is: Why is foreign fiction in translation still such a tough sell for American publishers?
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Icon and Author
Louis Menand, Thessaly La Force, Amelia Lester, and David Haglund have come together to discuss the influence of literary powerhouse and cultural icon Joan Didion in The New Yorker’s Out Loud Podcast. Our own Michael Bourne calls Didion America’s Truth Teller in his review of her biography.
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Hear what everyone has to say but don’t listen to anyone (except me).
Suddenly, a Knock on the Door author Etgar Keret shares “Ten Rules for Writers” with Rookie.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sacks; Hitchens; Li; Whitman
Out this week: Gratitude by Oliver Sacks; And Yet by Christopher Hitchens; The Lost Garden by Ang Li; and a new edition of Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems by Walt Whitman. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.