“To get me through a 550-page collection, the stories must be very good indeed. These are.” When Lionel Shriver participated in our Year in Reading ritual several years back, she dedicated her reading diary to William Trevor, who just passed away. “Trevor’s writing is so perfect that you don’t even notice it’s perfect,” she wrote. “He mainlines pure narrative directly into your veins. The words never get in the way; the words, like their author, disappear.”
In Memoriam William Trevor
@Embarrassment
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Stieg Larsson’s High School Fiction
A forthcoming anthology of Swedish crime fiction – fittingly entitled A Darker Shade of Sweden – will contain a piece from a 17-year-old Stieg Larsson, reports Julie Bosman. The book will be published this February.
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Walter White Returns
Get ready for the return of Breaking Bad by reading Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu in the LARB, and also by reading Max Rivlin-Nadler’s piece in The Nation. Or, if you want to take a walk down memory lane, check out Chuck Klosterman’s piece from last year in which he convincingly argued that Walter White’s odyssey makes for best drama on television. Lastly, here’s some good news for those among you who subscribe to DirectTV and are thus locked out of AMC: you can stream tonight’s episode on the company’s website.
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A Novel of Imposture
Recommended Listening: David Naimon interviews Rikki Ducornet about her new novel, Brightfellow. Also check out this Millions review of the book.
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Tournament of Books Zombie Round
After three years of judging, and now "like one of those guys who comes back after graduation and loiters creepily around campus, remembering [his] faded glory days," our site's editor-in-chief C. Max Magee finally made it into the booth for the zombie round in The Morning News' Tournament of Books. Check out the perils of "the ARC onslaught" and which books were missing from the tournament altogether.
Young Lions Fiction Award Finalists
The New York Public Library announced their eighteenth annual Young Lions Fiction Award, which is "given annually to an American writer age 35 or younger for either a novel or a collection of short stories." The 2018 finalists are: Lesley Nneka Arimah's What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Venita Blackburn's Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, Gabe Habash's Stephen Florida, Emily Ruskovich's Idaho, and Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart. From our archives: Habash and Zhang's 2017 Year in Reading entries.