Exciting news: Jill Soloway (Transparent) is adapting Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick for Amazon. You could also check out Kraus’s Year in Reading.
Kraus on Amazon
Tuesday New Release Day: Whitehead, Jin, Gray
Colson Whitehead's zombie thriller Zone One hits shelves today, as does Ha Jin's Nanjing Requiem. Also out is The Journals of Spalding Gray.
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On Walls and Compassion
"You know I would like to talk with you and lessen your fears. Regardless of our differences, we are related." New short fiction from Dutch novelist Claire Polders over at Electric Literature. Related: some wonderfully weird Trump metafiction.
On Social Novels
“What if, instead of simply critiquing Go Set a Watchman’s failure, we tried to analyze it? The new, older work makes more sense if we read it as an attempt to accomplish two tasks: first, to master—unsuccessfully, it turns out—the smart-magazine style that Harper Lee developed in her student journalism; and second, to write in a genre that often relied on the ironic elisions typical of ‘smart style’: the midcentury social-problem novel.” Tom Perrin on Harper Lee and the social novel. Pair with Michael Bourne's Millions review.
From the Mixed Up Files of DFW
Newsweek takes an "infinitely fascinating quest" through David Foster Wallace's just-released archive at University of Texas' Harry Ransom Center.
Aisle Nine
Recommended Reading: “Voices of the Walmart.”
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Goodreads Choice Awards
The results of this year's Goodreads Choice Awards are in, and a debut novelist took home Favorite Book of 2011 honors. Veronica Roth, author of Divergent, thanks her fans in this video. Other notable winners include Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 and Tina Fey's Bossypants, which won the Best Fiction and Best Humor categories, respectively. (They were also reviewed on The Millions here and here, respectively.)
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