For The Brooklyn Rail, John Ashbery answers some questions about writing in French, crushes on boys, and the presence of “it.” As he puts it, “I’m sort of notorious for my use of the pronoun ‘it’ without explaining what it means, which somehow never seemed a problem to me.”
It & Co.
Give the Gift of Dalkey
It’s that time of year again. Dalkey Archive’s annual holiday sale is upon us. Grab 10 books for $65, or 20 books for $120 — and that includes shipping!
Acts of gruesomely violent chivalry and vehicular aggression.
Yet another entry for the list of all time greatest single-purpose tumblrs: Witless Innuendo, bringing you “a collection of those end-of-review warnings from The New York Times‘ film critics.”
Castellanos Moya on the Bolaño Bubble, Part Two
Horacio Castellanos Moya, the author of Senselessness [review], again tackles the commodification of Roberto Bolaño, this time in a lengthy piece in Guernica. “It’s the landlords of the market,” he writes, “who decide the mambo that you dance.”
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“Smudged pink harlequin glasses”
Last week, I pointed readers to a Page-Turner essay by Amy Bloom, whose new novel, Lucky Us, came out on Tuesday. Now, as part of the By the Book series in the Times, she talks about her summertime reads, her first picture book and who she’d invite to a literary dinner party. (FYI, we’ve written about the series before.)
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Keeping Up
It’s extremely difficult to keep up with all of the books being published each day, so many thanks to the New York Times for this list of the latest in science fiction and fantasy. Now seems like as good a time as any to remind you about our Great Second-Half of 2016 Book Preview since we still have a bit of time left in the year.
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The Peripatetic
Over the past fifteen years, Mohsin Hamid has moved from New York, to London, and to Lahore, Pakistan, with stints in Italy and Greece. His new book, which came out yesterday, is a series of essays about his odyssey across the world, chronicling his observations and experiences that led him to move. At Bookforum, a review by Jake Lamar.
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