Over at The New York Times, Year in Reading alum Parul Sehgal reviews two books about migration, A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee and The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota.
“The Migrant is Not A Metaphor”
Best Books ‘So Far’
Amazon just picked its 2011 “Best Books of the Year So Far.”
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Lydia Davis Whistles
“The meteor brought them into the mainstream”
If you’re like me, you thought three quick thoughts when you heard about the Chelyabinsk meteor: 1) I hope everybody is okay; 2) I hope The Possessed author Elif Batuman finds time to write about this; and 3) Thank goodness for Russian dashboard cameras.
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Fireproof Books
AbeBooks points to clever fireproof editions of Farenheit 451 and Stephen King’s Firestarter. (Thanks Laurie)
“Refuge in the bottle and salvation on the page”
Olivia Laing has written an entire book about male writers and their relationships with alcohol, The Trip to Echo Spring, but in a piece for The Guardian she returns to the subject of writers and drink in order to respond to the question, what about women writers? Were any of them alcoholics? “Yes,” she writes, “of course.” She goes on to discuss the lives and work of Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, Elizabeth Bishop and Patricia Highsmith, their reasons for drinking and their experiences in a society much more willing to accept the struggles of men than of women. For more from Laing, be sure to check out her Year in Reading for 2013.
New Documentary on James Salter
Checkerboard Films has produced a new documentary film on James Salter, “James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime.” You can see Nick Antosca and myself, waxing admiringly, as the “young literary voices” who’ve been influenced by Salter.
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