The Guardian publishes an interview with my favorite indie bookstore, Harvard Book Store in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. Looking for book recommendations? Check out our Great Second-Half Preview.
Indie Reads
What to Expect
Chief among your more anxiety-producing kinds of literature is the genre of books geared towards expectant mothers. Examples of the genre offer every bit of advice imaginable — much of it contradictory — and condemn a laundry list of relatively common behaviors. At Salon, our own Lydia Kiesling recounts her own dive into the pregnancy-lit waters. This might also be a good time to read fellow staff writer Edan Lepucki on the perils of reading while expecting.
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Writing and Reading Race
Recommended Reading: Katy Simpson Smith on who can fictionalize slavery and writing across time and race. Our own Edan Lepucki writes on reading slavery in fiction.
RIP MCA
Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch AKA MCA has died at 47, due to cancer. Pitchfork has more.
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Stark
Recommended Reading: A series of short pieces by Rumpus readers on the subject of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
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DJ Díaz
“I’ve always thought Yunior’s voice isn’t possible without hip-hop,” Junot Díaz says. He discusses how hip-hop influenced his writing, his top three albums (Immortal Technique’s Revolutionary Vol. 2., Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, and Big Daddy Kane’s Long Live the Kane), and even Miley Cyrus in an interview with Salon. Previously, we reported that he wrote his first book to the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack.
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….and the joke may just be on you.
Aaron Wiener for Slate on attending a 24-hour long play in Berlin based on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. And we thought three to four hours of DFW was a marathon.
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If we explain this any more the joke will be lost
“The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World,” a blogger named Ishmael writes, on the sister blog to The Onion. (But I like these titles better.)
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Borges’s Best-Of
Jorge Louis Borges’s suggestions for the thirty-three books to begin his famed Library of Babel includes works by Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka, and even Borges himself–and, maddeningly, no women. Nothing against Borges, but you may want to spend some time with our own slightly more diverse Year in Reading series for a bit more variety.
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