Check out new fiction from You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine author Alexandra Kleeman.
Choking Hazard
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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Phonies
The case against The Catcher in the Rye. But what will all of the hip high school teachers assign now? (Our own Garth Risk Hallberg disagrees.)
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Earnest Jest
For Atlas Obscura, Tucker Leighty-Phillips writes on how a Portuguese-to-English phrasebook, introduced to English readers by Mark Twain, became a comedy sensation. Pair with this Millions piece on Twain’s travels.
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96 Years Later
“Her storytelling is magical and profound, creating connectivity between people and places: a signal of hope at a particularly divided moment in time.” Joining the company of Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, and Sjón, Turkish novelist Elif Şafak has been chosen as the fourth contributor for The Future Library Project. Şafak’s novel, Three Daughters of Eve, was featured in the second-half of our 2017 Great Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Frame, London, Stafford, Tennyson, Bennet
Janet Frame’s posthumous novel In the Memorial Room is out this week, as is a new e-book edition of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. Also out: Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems by the onetime Poet Laureate William Stafford; a new biography of Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and the latest edition of The Best American Magazine Writing.
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I’m sorry but this is a terrible story. Good gosh. I thought Kleeman was supposed to represent the new avant garde. This is straight out of an undergrad fiction workshop. Plot, prose, characterization all tedious. Yet this will be the only piece of fiction many people read this week. Contemporary American lit has so much more to offer than this. Fiction can be inventive, funny, fun, emotionally resonant, edgy…alive…this has all the life of a last-minute high school English paper.
Yipes! Agreed. I’ve read a hundred pieces as time-wastingly “okay” (until that amateurish finish) as that, online, in the past year or so. Why is that particular not bad/not good thing in the NYer? I can only imagine a shrug in response.