“To talk to Le Guin is to encounter alternatives. At her house, the writer is present, but so is Le Guin the mother of three, the faculty wife: the woman writing fantasy in tandem with her daily life.” The New Yorker dedicates a long profile to Ursula K. Le Guin. Pair with our interview with the prolific author.
The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin
Mary H.K. Choi’s Hidden Joy in Not Being Translated
Mary H.K. Choi discusses her new novel, Yolk, and why she is partially relieved it has not been translated into Korean, the language spoken by her parents.
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Book Sightings
With the advent of e-readers, books on the subway are getting harder and harder to spot. It takes dedication to get a sense of what people are reading these days. At The Awl, Ben Dolnick sets out to catalogue a week’s worth of sightings, which included a man reading Cloud Atlas and The Stranger and a teenage girl reading Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. You could also read our own Nick Moran on the question of whether e-readers are really green.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Lipsyte, Carson, Silver, Hamid, Miller, Oates, Graver
Sam Lipsyte’s new collection The Fun Parts is out this week. Also out are Red Doc> by Anne Carson, Mary Coin by Marisa Silver, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid, Jacob’s Folly by Rebecca Miller, The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates, and The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver.
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“Can you lend me [Goethe’s] Theory of Colors for a few weeks? It is an important work. His last things are insipid” -Beethoven
Booktryst offers a peek at famed German novelist and (apparently) amateur physicist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colors, revealing Goethe as a sort of proto-Kandinsky.
Must’ve Been a “Ruff” Proofread
Aspiring authors, take note. If you want to sell your latest book, grow another set of legs, some fur, and bark adorably. That’s what earned Uggie, the dog from The Artist, his forthcoming memoir, Uggie: My Story. Suddenly, our dog-book pun-a-thon from a while back seems prescient.
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Your Adventure is Chosen For You
Last week, popular science fiction author John Scalzi wrote a contentious (but necessary) blog post that likened the lives of straight white males to “the easiest difficulty setting” in the “videogame” known as life. While comments on the original post had to be closed due to uproar, the piece was reposted to Kotaku where the discussion rages on.
The Great American Sneaker
For every book lover who also values comfortable footwear, New Balance has announced a line of sneakers inspired by great American literature.
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