This week in the New Yorker Jane Hu analyzes the “dispassionate first-person narrators” prominent in works by English-speaking Asian authors and questions whether that makes it easier to identify with the narrator. She uses Chemistry by NBA 5 under 35 honoree Weike Wang as an example along with other recent works. “Against this tradition, there is, perhaps, another emerging, of Asian-Anglophone writers who both play with and thus begin to undo these tropes of Asian impersonality. The novels by Ishiguro, Park, Lin, and Wang all feature first-person narrators who keep their distance—actively denying readers direct interior access. This is true, it’s important to note, even when the characters they write are not themselves Asian.”
Voices in Asian-Anglophone Fiction
A Poetry Reading Workshop
“Poets ought to learn how to present work as well as produce it,” says Joe Weil, who shares some invaluable Tips for Doing a Poetry Reading. (Bonus: our own Janet Potter offers a tutorial on the appropriate way to introduce an author [or poet] before their reading.)
Burnt-out with Didion
Alice Bolin writes for The Believer about Joan Didion, Los Angeles, and Play It As It Lays. The novel was also listed as one of The Millions‘s “Burnt-out Summer Reads,” so if there’s ever a time to read it, it’s probably now.
Books and Bankruptcy
McSweeney’s has a personal account of the end of an antiquarian book business. This is a bummer (the bankruptcy, not the writing of Bill Cotter, a very pleasant man to whom I once tried to sell a book). (Via).
●
●
Out of Nowhere
Nell Zink, whose second novel comes out next week, has one of the lit world’s more unusual origin stories. An expat in Germany, she wrote her first novel in three weeks, after striking up a friendship over email with Jonathan Franzen. In the latest New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz details her story in full. You could also read Emily Gould’s recommendation of her work for Year in Reading.
●
●
HMH Broke
With debts and liabilities in excess of $1 billion, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has officially filed for bankruptcy.
●
●
“Total student”
To survive in the wastelands of Twitter, the promising spambot needs to craft an interesting bio. Which explains why one bot assumed the mantle of “bacon ninja.”
●
●