The New York Times reports that actress Carrie Fisher‘s books have risen to the top of Amazon’s bestseller lists following news of her death. Fisher penned the memoirs Wishful Drinking, Shockaholic, and The Princess Diarist, which just came out last month, as well as several novels, including the book-made-movie Postcards from the Edge. Our own Lydia Kiesling included Postcards on a reading list for her short-lived celebrity book club a few years back.
Books As Balm
Politics and Prizes
“I lost him when he became a neo-liberal.” Certain Swedish literary critics remain outraged that Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for literature despite abandoning his prior socialist political beliefs. (via Arts and Letters Daily)
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a small, diamond-like space
Rachel Syme set out to cover the failure of Dawn Powell’s diaries to sell at auction for the New Yorker and came away with a tender meditation on obsession, New York, and the business of biography.
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Natural Opposition
Recommended Reading: Michele Filgate’s interview with Leslie Jamison, who participated in Year in Reading this year.
Langewiesche on the Chilean Miners
The Outlaw Sea author William Langewiesche has a new ebook out in the “Single” format, Finding the Devil: Darkness, Light, and the Untold Story of the Chilean Mine Disaster, about the 2010 disaster that left 33 miners trapped for nearly two months.
Meditations on Meditations in Green
Recommended Reading: Nathaniel Rich discusses Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green, which he says is remarkable because “it convinces you that the war never ended.” Indeed, Rich writes, the author’s debut novel “suggests that Vietnam at some point transcended the Indochina peninsula and became a mental condition, a state of being not unlike certain forms of insanity, that has become encrypted in our genetic code.”
This Is Not Confessional Poetry
Over at the Bennington Review, Michael Dumanis interviews Year in Reading alumna Dorothea Lasky about persona poetry, the first-person “I,” and creativity. Pair with Gila Lyons’s Millions essay on creativity and madness.
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Look Away
“Recently, a friend told me she didn’t like pictures of herself because she never looked the way she thought she did in her head. I think this pretty much describes the universal horror that is looking at your own photos, and that’s why I love the selfie so much. It gives you all the controls to the story you are telling.” In defense of the selfie.
Ripatrazone & Reviews
Our staff writer Nick Ripatrazone has published two books in the last year – the short story collection Good People and the novella We Will Listen For You – and both have recently been reviewed in New Jersey papers, which agree that the books are “an invitation to look beyond the stone walls of churches and gape in wonder at the world and the unknowable vistas beyond.” Pair with Nick’s ever-relevant essays on teaching English and becoming a writer, not a priest.
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