We need Barnes & Noble. Alex Shephard writes on the role of the retailer for publishers and readers. You could also check out our series on the Future of the Book.
B&N or Bust
My Struggle Continues
Ben Parker has published a review in The Los Angeles Review of Books of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book Four, which was recently translated by Don Bartlett. Read Knausgaard’s thoughts on repetition and its reflections in the natural world at The Millions.
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Keija Pernissen Interview
The Missouri Review‘s Michael Nye sits down for an interview with The Ruins of Us author Keija Parnissen. The book, he says, is his “first must read book of the year.”
Susan Orlean’s Library Book
Year in Reading alum Susan Orlean’s next book will be entitled The Library Book. It will be “a love letter to an endangered institution, exploring their history, their people, their meaning and their future as they adapt and redefine themselves in a digital world.” The book will focus in particular on the unsolved 1986 razing of the Los Angeles Central Library.
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“The point is not satisfaction”
“The peace may be holding, but the process is faltering,” writes Colum McCann, forty years after the Dublin/Monaghan bombings, in his evaluation of Ireland’s present relationship with the “Troubles.” “It is, of course, naïve to expect total reconciliation,” he continues. “Some grievances are so deep that the people who suffered them will never be satisfied. But the point is not satisfaction — the point is that the present is superior to the past, and it has to be cultivated as such.”
This is your brain on metaphor
Annie Murphy Paul looks to neuroscience to understand the pleasure of the written word.
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Danielle Steel Has Had Enough
Ultra-bestselling author Danielle Steel went off recently about something that’s been bothering her for ages. “I think some people are threatened if one is enterprising or has many/varied interests,” she writes. In particular, “it’s about men who don’t like women getting out there, doing something new or innovative and accomplishing something.”
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