Looking up a book title on Google? The search results now include listings at your local library, reports The Digital Reader. See also our own Jacob Lambert’s entreaty, “An Open Letter to the Person Who Wiped Boogers on My Library Book.”
Querying the Card Catalog
Frank Ocean’s Fiction
A while back, Frank Ocean alluded to the possibility of one day writing a novel. Asked by Guardian interviewer Rebecca Nicholson about his immediate plans following the success of his last album, Channel Orange, the musician replied, “I might just write a novel next.” The response seemed unserious. But now, in Jeff Himmelman’s long profile of Ocean for The New York Times Magazine, it appears the idea may have a bit more traction. “It’s fiction,” says Ocean. “And it’s about brothers.”
●
●
Hilary Mantel’s Hospital Diary
"In the days after the procedure I was sometimes so exhausted by movement that I would wait patiently for someone to come in and give me a paper cup of pills that was almost, not quite, out of my reach. But somehow, I would always contrive to get my pen in my hand, however far it had rolled... When Virginia Woolf’s doctors forbade her to write, she obeyed them. Which makes me ask, what kind of wuss was Woolf?" Hilary Mantel writes a diary on hospitalization for the London Review of Books.
●
●
Reading Tonight at Housing Works
New York-area readers are invited to come tonight to Housing Works bookstore in SoHo, where I'll be appearing at 7 p.m. alongside the Norwegian wunderkind Johan Harstad. We'll be reading from and discussing A Field Guide to the North American Family and Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? Music courtesy of Brooklyn's The Sweaters (not to be confused with The Cardigans.)
●
●
“Surprise attacks”
Last week, I pointed to former Millions-er Emily M. Keeler’s review of Wolf in White Van, the new novel by John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. Now, at Slate, Carl Wilson offers his own praise of the book, which he describes as “not the kind of rallying cry or dark comfort that Mountain Goats fans are used to, but a complex meditation.”
●
●
Choking Hazard
Check out new fiction from You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine author Alexandra Kleeman.
●
●