Last week, I directed you to Catie Disabato’s Thick Skin interview at 0s&1s. This week, Year in Reading alum Laura van den Berg joins them for the latest installment of the series, in which authors address their critics. We also recently interviewed van den Berg following the release of her first novel, Find Me.
Addressing the Critics
Moleskine’s Imminent IPO
A while back, I noted that Moleskine was preparing an initial public offering on the Italian stock exchange. Well, now the time has come. On April 3, you will be allowed to buy shares of the notebook company (and perhaps keep records of them within your Moleskine). If you’re interested, you might want to read up on the company’s history – and also on how to pronounce its name.
Musical Theories
We’ve written a fair bit about the By the Book series at the Times. You can read a selection of the best entries in a collection published by the paper. This week, the series featured another novel guest: Alan Gilbert, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Sample quote: “I don’t seek out books about music. I’ve read them over the years, but somehow, as a genre, it isn’t something I am specifically looking for.”
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The Left Coast On Lefties
Southpaws unite! The LA Review of Books takes on left-handedness. Now, someone use this can opener for me.
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The One I Love
Recommended Reading: Sarah Sansolo on her childhood obsession with Britney Spears.
Tuesday New Release Day: Max, Evison, Levithan
New this week is D.T. Max’s biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, which we excerpted last week. Also out are The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison and Every Day by David Levithan.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Smith, Jones, Jemc, Dancyger, Marantz
Zadie Smith headlines a new week of new books, including essays by angry women and an excellent exploration of the rise of the online alt-right.
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A Change in Tone
In an illuminating interview for Slate, James Wood revises his opinion on David Foster Wallace and discusses how aging can change critics. As he puts it, “At exactly the moment that I wanted really to write, and started writing poems and then trying to write bad fiction, I was reading with a view to learning stuff. I was reading poetry. How did Auden do his stanza forms? And I was trying to copy those. What’s a successful poem, what’s an unsuccessful poem? […] What’s a good sentence? I don’t think I’ve changed. I am as sincerely interested in novels that fail as I am in novels that succeed. I just want to work them out. It’s a pleasure for me actually.” Top it off with Jonathan Russell Clark’s essay on Wood’s The Nearest Thing to Life.