Out this week: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich; Improvement by Joan Silber; Bunk by Kevin Young; Debriefing: Collected Stories by Susan Sontag; and Don’t Save Anything by James Salter. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Erdrich; Silber; Young; Sontag; Salter
The Electric Typewriter Two-fer: Tom Wolfe and Susan Orlean
The folks at The Electric Typewriter have struck again, this time offering fifteen classic reads from Tom Wolfe and twenty more from Susan Orlean.
Hodgman on the Apocalypse
Humorist, author, and sometime PC representative John Hodgman is interviewed for The A.V. Club. Among the discussion points? Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road.
Room Service With Proust
You might never be able to finish Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, but you can stay in his hotel. France is marketing its literary heritage with hotels named after famous authors. At the aforementioned Marcel, guests can stay in rooms named after Proust characters. If you aren’t a fan of madeleines, you can check into the R Kipling or Le Pavillon des Lettres.
Grid World
“He is for the most part interested in documenting the sources of our unusual suffering, those initial shocks that brought about the trauma in the first place. Nothing ‘languishes listlessly’ in his music; all those slowly orbiting fragments are drawn back together in furious rotation, sucked inexorably in, towards a volatile core. The mood never stabilizes; madness reigns supreme.” This piece by Tom Regel at The Rumpus on realism in the work of DJ/Producer Flying Lotus is both thorough and convincing.
Born in New Orleans, raised in New Orleans
Recommended Reading: The Oxford American just unlocked David Ramsey’s 2008 piece on “How Lil Wayne helped me survive my first year teaching in New Orleans.”
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Big Fans
Chances are you know (and chances are you wonder why you know) that 50 Shades of Grey started out as a work of Twilight fanfiction. You probably harbor some deep suspicions about the value of fanfiction as a genre. But what if I were to tell you that the prototypical work of fanfiction is… The Gospels?