“[I]n the days following the election, one thing became clear: many librarians are anxious about the future.” From Carla Hayden to copyright reform, Publisher’s Weekly has the top 10 library stories of 2016. Also recommended: a piece by Daniel Penev from our own pages earlier this year, about how libraries matter now more than ever.
The Year in Libraries
David Fincher to Join the Gone Girl Team
David Fincher, who helmed the American cinematic adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, may join the team working on the film for Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Flynn herself penned the first draft of the screenplay. As you wait (im)patiently for the project to get underway, you can take our own Michael Bourne’s advice and treat yourself to Flynn’s earlier books.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Murakami, Jobs, Nadas, Millet, Kahneman
It’s another huge week for new releases. Happy Murakami day! Haruki Murakami’s long-awaited 1Q84 is finally here – look for our review tomorrow, as is Walter Isaacson’s headline-making biography of Steve Jobs. Also out is another massive and hotly anticipated work in translation (1152 pages!), Hungarian Peter Nadas’s Parallel Stories. Lydia Millet has a new novel out, Ghost Lights, and Thinking, Fast and Slow is set to arrive from Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
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Finnegans What, Now?
I hope you had your Wheaties this morning, because this one is a doozy. Scientists at Poland’s Institute of Nuclear Physics have discovered complex “fractal” sentence patterning in classic works of literature that is nearly identical to “ideal” mathematics. Maybe Finnegans Wake does make sense, after all.
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The Class of 2013
The Public Domain Review takes a look at the “Class of 2013,” a k a their “top pick of artists and writers whose works will, on 1st January 2013, be entering the public domain.” Among the names highlighted is Robert Musil, whose novel The Man Without Qualities was reviewed on our site by Matthew Gallaway.
Love and Correspondence
On Monday, the Harry Ransom Center announced that it had acquired the complete archive of Gabriel García Márquez, which includes notebooks, photo albums and correspondence by the late Nobel laureate. For Márquez fans, the most important part of the collection may We’ll See Each Other in August, the author’s final, unfinished novel. Pair with: Charles Finch on Márquez and the modern novel.
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