Is Karl Ove Kanusgaard’s seven-volume, 3,600-page, vaugely-autobiographical epic possible to pitch over the course of an elevator ride? The good people over at n+1 are willing to give it a shot! Have you ever wondered about the view outside of Knausgaard’s window? I bet you have now.
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Chicago’s Conscience
“If Gwendolyn Brooks wrote fiction, we’d say she was brilliant at world-building–but the world she builds is the real one, the part that didn’t used to make it into the pages of literary magazines.” On the continued relevance of Brooks’s poetry in the context of racial violence in Chicago. Pair with a piece on the power of reading poetry aloud.
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“Author Loses Leg in Lagoon”
Writing the London Review of Books‘ “Diary” this week, South African scholar and political activist R.W. Johnson: “Author Loses Leg in Lagoon.”
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“The meteor brought them into the mainstream”
If you’re like me, you thought three quick thoughts when you heard about the Chelyabinsk meteor: 1) I hope everybody is okay; 2) I hope The Possessed author Elif Batuman finds time to write about this; and 3) Thank goodness for Russian dashboard cameras.
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Irv Loathed NPR
Recommended Reading: A piece of new fiction by Joanthan Safran Foer! Go check out “Maybe It Was the Distance” over at The New Yorker. Here’s a review of Foer’s Tree of Codes by Kevin Nguyen for The Millions which calls the format of the book, “a wonderful experiment in what a book can be, and also home to a mediocre novel.”
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Saving Civilization Through Stories With Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro discusses his latest novel, Klara and the Sun, and affirms the importance of literature and storytelling in society.
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Dickinson’s Self-Creation
“Dickinson wasn’t a madwoman, but she was maddened with rage—against a culture that had no place for a woman with her own fiercely independent mind and will.” On Emily Dickinson’s self-creation at Lit Hub. Pair with a piece on Paul Legault’s English-to-English translations of Dickinson’s poems.
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This is the thing that mystifies me about Knausgaard. However good or bad the books are (I’ve only read the first one), how on earth – in this age, in this economy – did he convince a publisher to that a seven-part quasi-autobiographical series was a good idea? How did he pitch it so that a publisher would say “YES LET’S PRINT ALL OF THEM”? Was it really the strength of his previous work? It’s a head-scratcher for anyone who’s ever tried to pitch just one book.