“Lillian haunted me when she was alive. And she has haunted me since her death in July 2015. And she has haunted me in spectacular ways since I published my memoir a month ago.” Sherman Alexie has cancelled the rest of a book tour to promote his new memoir about his relationship with his mother, reports The Guardian. See also: our interview with Ellen Forney, who illustrated Alexie’s National Book Award-winning YA novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
She Has Haunted Me in Spectacular Ways
E-Reading: Up. E-Readers: Down.
Young Money author Kevin Roose provides a glimpse at “What the Future of Reading Looks Like.” His prediction does not bode well for the makers of e-readers, though, and it’s not because e-books are on the wane. On the contrary, it’s because “when people read e-books, they’re doing it on their existing tablets and smartphones, not on devices built expressly for reading,” he writes. (Related: this may have a positive effect when it comes to rising carbon emissions.)
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Hercules for Millennials
Need a reprieve from the Herculean task of staying awake at work? Brooke Gamble McAdam takes on the myth of Hercules, giving him a millennial spin.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Tyler; Shriver; Watson; Tremblay; Raymond; Juchau
Out this week: Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler; The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver; As Good as Gone by Larry Watson; Disappearance at Devil’s Rock by Paul Tremblay; My Last Continent by Midge Raymond; and The World Without Us by Mireille Juchau. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
Encyclopedic Knowledge
A transcript of Jorge Luis Borges’s conversation with Argentinian poet Osvaldo Ferrari about the power and pleasure of academic knowledge appears in English for the first time. As Borges explains it, “I think that the encyclopedia, for a leisurely, curious man, is the most pleasing of literary genres.”
The Muse of Impossibility
“[T]he use of similes and metaphors confesses the defeat of language: we must compare because we cannot say.” -From Alberto Manguel’s stunning essay “The Muse of Impossibility” in The Threepenny Review. (via The Rumpus)
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