“When watching [Abbas] Kiarostami films, one also has a great sense of another kind of freedom not found in Hollywood movies, nor in most European art films: freedom from the creeping realization that a film we are watching was made by a cynical shit or a self-deluded megalomaniac.” Here’s something you don’t see every day — an essay that begins with an Independence Day showing of The Purge: Election Year, and somehow ends up at a poetic examination of Kiarostami’s artistic legacy.
A Quality of Immortality
Tuesday New Release Day: Pamuk; Murray; Houellebecq; Smiley; Cantor; Shonkwiler; Vowell
Out this week: A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk; The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray (whom our own Mark O’Connell interviewed today); Submission by Michel Houellebecq; Golden Age by Jane Smiley; The Hours Count by Jillian Cantor; Moon Up, Past Full by Eric Shonkwiler; and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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Voracious Reading
Are you the type of reader who craves the food described in novels like our own Nick Moran? Then take The Guardian’s “Food in fiction” quiz. Sample question: “According to the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, what kind of food is eaten tomorrow, yesterday, but never today?”
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Get Your Poetry On
Danielle Pafunda celebrates her daylong reign over the Academy of American Poets’ Twitter feed with a cento contest: She tweets the lines, you compose the poem, and three winners take home a selection of signed books written by these contest judges.