“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” You’ve seen the quote on Pinterest and Tumblr, so why not dig a little deeper into Aldous Huxley’s ideas about the transcendent capabilities of music?
Always and Everywhere
Behind the National Book Awards
Our own Edan Lepucki interviewed National Book Award finalists George Saunders and Rachel Kushner for the National Book Foundation. Saunders discussed money issues in his writing. “Now I feel like paucity vs. grace is one of the great American issues—we all live with it every day.” Kushner explained her writing process. “The sentences are beads on a string; I see each one as essential.”
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Wallace Stevens Week
Wallace Stevens Week(s) begin with a sprint today at Big Other, featuring an interview with poet and critic James Longenbach, an essay on Stevens’ other work, in insurance, and a list of his “most maddening, funny and bizarre” titles.
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Curiosities
Friend of The Millions, proprietor of Pinky’s Paperhaus, and all around great gal Carolyn Kellogg has landed at the LA Times book blog Jacket Copy. We have little doubt that she’ll do great things there.Following Heath Ledger’s untimely death, BBC looks at the myriad ways in which Hollywood has dealt with losing an actor mid-production, dating back to 1937 “when Jean Harlow died, aged 26, during the making of Saratoga. With filming 90% complete, a lookalike and two Harlow sound-a-likes (voice doubles) took up where the star left off.”Bookride is back with an intriguing look at the collectors’ market for Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. Don’t miss this tidbit: “By the way sending books to authors for signing is something of a gamble – Thomas Hardy used to keep all the books sent to him neatly shelved in a spare room.”Speaking of Garcia Marquez, Edith Grossman, the translator who has shaped the Latin American canon for English speakers over the last few decades, is profiled in bookforum.The New Republic offers the story behind the controversial New York Times John McCain/lobbyist story.The Morning News returns with its third annual Tournament of Books. Sadly, there will be no Bloggers’ Pool this year (despite our being eager to participate again), but Coudal Partners is sponsoring a betting pool for charity this year. As of this writing, On Chesil Beach and Run have had the most money thrown their way.A cartoon drawn on the pages of Moby DickAnd finally, McSweeney’s offers up some sweet Ashton Kutcher fan fiction.
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10 More Books to Read Just Because
Since we’re deep into the season of “year end” lists, here’s a list of ten great novels written by women that didn’t get a lot of critical attention this year. That isn’t to say that aren’t a ton of other books deserving of this distinction, just that these are some really good ones. Go list-crazy and pair with our own Year in Reading series.
The Pandora of Books
In The Atlantic, Johnathan A. Knee writes about how curation and aggregation can be more profitable than content creation. That is the idea behind BookLamp, a new search engine based on books’ content and writing style, not sales data. “At times, being able to ignore the marketing data can be good for the recommendation,” explains CEO Aaron Stanton.
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Force Feeding
“I am uncomfortable in my role as witness.” Nehal El-Hadi writes for The New Inquiry about the online spectacle of black death, exploring what “Black thanatosensitive” user experience design might look like. And ICYMI: our own Ismail Muhammad on Frank Ocean and depictions of the black male body.
All Songs 24/7
Wow, NPR, this is kind of amazing: “A non-stop mix of every song ever played during the 10 years of All Songs Considered.”
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The Cultural Logic of Margaret Atwood
Fredric Jameson reviews Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood for the London Review of Books.