At Louisiana Channel, Colm Tóibín discusses finding the perfect sentence to start your book. In honor of the Oscars, Bill Morris wrote about the adapted screenplay for Tóibín’s Brooklyn.
Finding the Words
The Roberto Bolaño Bubble
“The continued publication and popular packaging of [Roberto Bolaño’s] incomplete work may actually be diluting his reputation as a writer of varied talents and fearless ambition.” Sam Carter is wary of The Roberto Bolaño Bubble.
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Goodbye to King of the Blurbs
Recently, it seemed hard to find a book not blurbed by Gary Shteyngart. He did blurb 150 books in the past decade. Yet now the author has decided to mostly retire from blurbing, he announced in The New Yorker. “Literature can and will go on without my mass blurbing. Perhaps it may even improve.” Pair with: Our own Bill Morris’s essay on whether or not to blurb.
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Love DNA
This week in book-related infographics, and just in time for Valentine’s Day: a look at the “Love DNA of Classic Novels.”
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The Truth Is Here
Here’s a piece of news you likely didn’t see coming: David Duchovny has published a novel. Titled Holy Cow, it deals, in the words of interviewer Taffy Brodesser-Akner, with “a traumatized cow, a sassy turkey and a pig converting to Judaism.” She talks with the X-Files star in this week’s Times Magazine.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Larsen; Hamid; Afrika; Stace; Lethem
Out this week: I Am Radar by Reif Larsen; Discontent and Its Civilizations by Mohsin Hamid; Bitter Eden by Tatamkhulu Afrika; Wonderkid by Wesley Stace; and Lucky Alan, a new story collection by Jonathan Lethem. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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Autobiographical Revisionism
“‘It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.’ The autobiography of the imagination then is an autobiography of our base desires, the things we haven’t done but have longed for. It is our fantasies, our secrets from which we curate by redaction how someone else sees us. It is an autobiography of instinct, desire.” Emilia Phillips on poetry as the autobiography of the imagination, over at Ploughshares.
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The Signature Smirk of the Absurd
This essay in the Times Literary Supplement on Kurt Vonnegut‘s “strangely central place in American fiction despite his occasional insistence on his own marginality” is certainly worth a read.
The Count
“And who could disagree? Joyce Carol Oates expressed her view on Twitter: ‘Wikipedia bias an accurate reflection of universal bias. All (male) writers are writers; a (woman) writer is a woman writer.'” Wikipedia has got a women writers problem.
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