Recommended Reading (Inauguration Day edition): “Haecceity” by Joshua Clover.
“you have not thought thru clearly”
Tough Broads
“The rest of the morning went like that. We did synchronized clapping. We did active listening. We did a role-play exercise in which I was a girl waiting for a bus and Karloff was a masher, but when I started flirting back, she didn’t like it. I got four more cups of coffee and felt brokenhearted when my bottle gave up its last drop.” Philip Marlowe attends a court-mandated women’s studies workshop.
2010 National Book Award Winners Announced
The 2010 National Book Awards were announced this evening. In fiction, Jaimy Gordon won for The Lord of Misrule; in nonfiction, Patti Smith won for Just Kids; in poetry, Terrance Hayes won for Lighthead; and for young people’s literature, Kathryn Erskine won for Mockingbird.
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You Are the Best People
“I am sitting at the open window (at four a.m.) and breathing the lovely air of a spring morning. Life is still good, and it is worth living on a May morning – I assert that life is beautiful in spite of everything! … In a word, there are many thorns, but the roses are there too.” These excerpts from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s letters are just gorgeous.
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The Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern‘s debut novel The Night Circus gets the NPR treatment. She’s totally appreciative.
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Tuesday Links: More LBC, Bookride, Vonnegut
My nominee for this round has been posted at the LBC blog. Though it didn’t grab my cohorts enough to be named our “Read This” pick, I do highly recommend it.I recently happened upon bookride, a blog by a rare book dealer that each day posts about a valuable book, explaining why the book is collectible and why it’s worth what it is. Fascinating stuff. A recent post looks at a rare copy of The Waste Land.Simon at Bloggasm rounded up a bunch tributes to Kurt Vonnegut including a slightly modified version of my post from last week.
Huh. Who Knew?
“The Mariko Aoki phenomenon is a phenomenon consisting of the urge to defecate while visiting a bookstore. Originating in Japan, it is named for the woman who first publicized such an urge.”
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From Jakarta to Franfurt
In light of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, which had Indonesia as the official guest of honor, check out Wayan Sunarta’s essay on the rise of Indonesian literature abroad. As he explains it, “Although Indonesian literature is in the ascendant at home, it has so far failed to establish itself internationally. The number of works translated from Indonesian is still very small.”
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