“Like reading, love works in roughly the same way every time, but the details of any given case are irreducibly particular, and it’s in the details that everything happens.” Lidija Haas on Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot. (You could also read our review by Virginia Marshall.)
Boiled Down
Delicious Reads
Attention Los Angeles-based readers and eaters! On Tuesday evening, June 29, 2010, Michelle Huneven and Samantha Peale will be at Canele in Atwater Village to celebrate the paperback releases of their latest novels (Blame and The American Painter, Emma Dial, respectively.) Food from the books will be served–the 3-course dinner is only $34. Skylight will be selling the books.
Confessions of a Modern Opium Smoker
“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and Charles Dickens wrote about opium smoking in their novels. But if you read the way they describe opium smoking, without a doubt these people never saw the real thing. It’s laughable…What we see in movies, even to this day, with the obligatory London opium-smoking scene is complete fiction.” Interview with a modern-day opium addict.
Hot Authors
“Author-hot” has historically been a pejorative phrase, or at best faint praise, but Canteen is looking to change that with its “Hot Authors” project, “reinterpreting and reappropriating fashion magazine glam” for the Moleskine set. The redesigned Canteen website also features an interview with yours truly – not, I’m sad to report, included in the “Hot Authors” package.
Literary Real Estate
Test your knowledge of famous settings and / or fantasize about living in a “secluded picturesque manor with history” or a “palatial long island home” perfect for parties: “Classic Houses in Literature Go on the Imaginary Real Estate Market – a Quiz.”
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And Now for Some Humor
In which Dr. Indiana Jones is regrettably denied tenure because “his timeliness in grading and returning assignments was a concern.”
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List of Lengthy Books
In honor of our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire (which stands at a hefty nine hundred pages), Bethanne Patrick has compiled a reading list of lengthy books at Lit Hub. You could also check out our interview with Hallberg.
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