“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
Following eBooks at CES
Open Publishing Lab is keeping tabs on all the ebook news coming out of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas with photos of the various new gadgets and prototypes. (Thanks, Buzz)
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Tuesday New Release Day: Alameddine; Palacio; Semple; Lianke; French; Chang; Zink
New this week: The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine; The Mortifications by Derek Palacio; Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple; The Explosion Chronicles by Yan Lianke; The Trespasser by Tana French; The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang; and Nicotine by Nell Zink. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
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“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”
Does the central, eponymous poem from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire stand on its own as a literary masterwork?
Saving Bookstores
Recommended Reading: On the “small, but noticeable, sustained, and continuous” resurgence of indie bookstores.
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