Check out an illustrated adaptation of Lydia Davis’s “In a House Besieged” by Roman Muradov at The Paris Review Daily. Pair with a piece on Davis’s short short stories and Twitter.
Davis Illustrated
Tuesday New Release Day: St. Aubyn; Dyer; Nelson; Lane; O’Donnell; Zeh; Tolkien
Out this week: Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn; Another Great Day at Sea by Year in Reading alum Geoff Dyer; Funny Once by Antonya Nelson; Black Lake by Johanna Lane; Closed Doors by Lisa O’Donnell; Decompression by the German writer Juli Zeh; and J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf, published now for the first time. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2014 Book Preview.
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Gents in Glasses
Didn’t get a chance to show off your Tolstoy and sexy frames at the last I Like Your Glasses: Literary Speed Dating? Don’t worry because CoverSpy and Housing Works Bookstore Cafe will be hosting another event on October 23 at the store. This time bookworms are restricted to ages 21-39. Tickets are $15 (including a free drink), but to encourage more gents, Millions men can get their tickets for $12 if they use the promotional code “MILLIONS.” Pair with: our essay on attending the first I Like Your Glasses.
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Win Zak Smith’s Gravity’s Rainbow
The Quarterly Conversation is holding a contest for readers. They’ll be giving away a hardcover copy of Zak Smith’s illustrated Gravity’s Rainbow.
Praising Penelope
Biographer and novelist Penelope Fitzgerald of the Booker Prized novel Offshore, was born on this day in 1916. Ranked twenty-third on the London Times 2008 list of “Britain’s Fifty Greatest Writers Since WWII,” Fitzgerald didn’t begin her twenty-year writing career until age fifty-eight. Can we say Post-40 Bloomer?
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Risk-Taker, Miracle-Maker
“Maybe the optimists are right; maybe poetry does help you live your life. And maybe they are more right than they know, and it rounds you out for death.” Andrew O’Hagan writes for The Guardian about falling in love with poetry and coming to see the poet as “a risk-taker, a miracle-maker, a moral panjandrum and a convict of the senses.”
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