“On the outside, she was immaculately poised, always elegantly dressed, with perfectly cut, silver hair; witty, brilliant company, properly opinionated, impatient with compromise or cant, what the book blurbs called ‘fiercely intelligent.’ But this came at a cost.” Jenny Diski‘s husband, the poet Ian Patterson, remembers his wife for The Guardian.
Jenny Diski In Memoriam
Something Whole
“The short story, as a form, has plenty of defenders,” the collection of unconnected short stories, maybe not so much. In an essay for LitHub, regular Millions contributor Jonathan Russell Clark praises the unlinked stories of Barbara the Slut and Other People and Single, Carefree, Mellow because “despite a lack of the wholeness of a novel, something complete and true and hard-won emerges by the end.”
Tuesday Means New Releases
Sometime Millions contributor Elif Batuman sees her debut effort The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them hit shelves today. Also new today is Not Art by Peter Esterhazy who wowed Garth at PEN/World Voices in 2008.
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Saunders Story a Bite-Sized Buy
George Saunders’ short story “Fox 8,” which originally appeared in McSweeney’s 33, is available as of today as a $0.99 ebook.
I’ve read (wolfed down) every single one of the (dozens/ hundreds of?) pieces JD wrote for the LRB … along with In Gratitude and The Sixties. Clear-eyed, honest, fearless and pretenses-shrivellingly witty from beginning to her literal end. I can think of thirty of her colleagues (and a few civilians), off the top of my head, I wish that we could trade for her back.
A link to JD in fine form:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n18/jenny-diski/it-wasnt-him-it-was-her