“On January 14, 2017, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus—America’s oldest and best circus, America’s last true touring circus—announced that it was closing, and six days later the country mourned, with an exit parade, a grand-finale funeral: the inauguration of Donald J. Trump.” Year-in-Reading alum Joshua Cohen, whose Book of Numbers spent seven months on our top-10 list back in 2015, and whose new novel Moving Kings made our most-anticipated list for the latter half of this year, reflects on the end of an era for The Point.
The Greatest Show on Earth
Into Thin Air
Most readers have their own idiosyncratic systems for displaying the most valuable titles they own. For a lot of people, it makes the most sense to keep their favorite books on a particular shelf. At The Paris Review Daily, Sadie Stein writes about an odd phenomenon — “The Phantom Shelf,” which consists of books you love so much you had to lend them to friends. (Related: Kevin Hartnett on reading our parents’ bookshelves.)
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Dispatches From ‘Nam
“In Saigon I always went to sleep stoned so I always lost my dreams, probably just as well, sock in deep and dim under that information and get whatever rest you could, wake up tapped of all images but the one remembered from the day before, with only the taste of a bad dream in your mouth like you’d been chewing on a roll of dirty old pennies in your sleep.” The 100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time series over at The Guardian soldiers on with its ninth pick, Michael Herr’s Dispatches.
Televising Literature
“Tom Stoppard isn’t shy about tackling literary giants. The British playwright has rewritten Hamlet for the stage and recently turned Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina into a Hollywood feature. But he struggled with a television adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s sprawling modernist masterpiece Parade’s End.”
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“I don’t want kids, but there’s nothing else to do.”
You can take a sneak peek at The French Exit author Elisa Gabbert’s forthcoming book of poetry, which is due out from Black Ocean this year.
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RIP Jenny Diski
Jenny Diski, a prolific author who’d kept up a serialized diary of living with cancer since 2014, died this morning at the age of 68. Her partner, Ian Patterson, broke the news on Twitter, after which outlets including The Guardian confirmed it. The author had recently published her final book, a memoir.