Irving Howe asks how Hemingway commanded the attention of a generation. Howe writes, “His great subject, I think, was panic.” Our own Michael Bourne recently answered this question, recognizing Hemingway as a middlebrow revolutionary.
Conquest of Panic
How Writers Read Vol. 2
I’ve written before about The Believer‘s “How Writers Read” series, and now the second installment, which includes questions about guilty reading and the constant debate between short and long books, is online.
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On the Ledge
“For years, growing up, I was obsessed with the thought; among my earliest memories is the desire, at age three or four, to run in front of an oncoming bus. Not because I wanted to see what would happen, but because I was sure I knew what would happen: I wouldn’t have to live any longer. I suspect there may be a suicide gene.” Clancy Martin tackles a perennially touchy subject.
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The Iron Lady Lit
Hilary Mantel is going from the brutal politics of the Tudors to the Thatcher era. Her next book will be a collection of short stories about Margaret Thatcher called The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and is due out in September.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Eugenides, Hollinghurst, Kadare, Butler
One of the biggest literary releases of the year is out today, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Read the book’s opening here. Another literary heavy hitter out today is The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst. One of Albanian writer Ismail Kadare’s masterpieces, The Palace of Dreams, is now back in print in English, and Blake Butler’s memoir Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia is now on shelves.
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A Rush of Blood to the Head?
An intriguing pairing: Norman Rush tackles James Ellroy‘s Blood’s A Rover in the current New York Review of Books.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Smiley; Wallace; Manzini; Meloy; Gizzi; Eliot; Knausgaard
Out this week: Ember Days by our own Nick Ripatrazone, Early Warning by Jane Smiley; Madam President by The View co-host Nicolle Wallace; Black Run by Antonio Manzini; Devotion by Maile Meloy; Collected Poems by Michael Gizzi; Volume 5 of The Letters of T.S. Eliot; and Book 4 of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
The Best Single Issue of Any Literary Magazine, Ever
What is the best single issue of any literary magazine? Luna Park nominates Granta 8: Dirty Realism, and explains why.
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