Recommended Reading: On Patricia Highsmith, Carol, and being the queer daughter of a queer mother: “I am doomed to die an ugly death or at least to be separated from my partner, probably violently. So is my queer mother and my partner and my cousin and many of my friends. We are all doomed, it seems, because this is the only story American media tells about queer women.”
The High Price
Words of the Year Watch, Con’t
Two more words of the year as 2016 comes to a close: Merriam-Webster has chosen “surreal” while The Guardian, in an act of timeliness, nominates “unpresidented.”
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Written History
The New Republic takes a look at Adrienne Rich’s never-before-seen letters, which trace her feminist awakening.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Bolaño, Crichton, Sondheim
Another posthumously published Roberto Bolaño novel has arrived, The Third Reich. Time to update our Bolaño Syllabus again? Also posthumously published is Michael Crichton’s Micro, which was a third finished when he died and was completed using Crichton’s notes by Richard Preston. Also new this week is Stephen Sondheim’s Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011).
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Tuesday New Release Day: Murakami; Lively; Lehane; Toibin; Lepucki
Out this week: Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami; The Purple Swamp Hen by Penelope Lively; Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane; House of Names by Colm Toibin; and Woman No. 17 by our own Edan Lepucki. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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On Judging
“Gobble a lot of fiction very quickly and you soon find yourself suffering from the literary equivalent of a food intolerance. Oh no, you think, not another novel about X or Y. At these moments, only one thing keeps you going: the faint hope that the book in question might turn out to be the greatest novel ever written about X or Y.” Rachel Cooke writes for The Guardian about reading 80 books in four months and the process of judging the Folio prize.
Things to Be Cognizant Of
All of us have particular words that we use a little too often. Writers tend to be embarrassed about their predilections for certain turns of phrase. At Slate, Matthew J.X. Malady reacts to the news that he uses iteration too much, and delves into the ways our verbal habits spread to others.
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The Arrangements
The New York Times Book Review commissioned a work of fiction about the election from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She chose to write about Melania Trump. If you can handle more Trump, check out Greg Chase’s portrait of a Trump supporter, based on Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury.
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