In a sea of Best Book lists, LitHub spoke to 40 booksellers about the most overlooked titles of 2017. On the list? Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, which was featured in Emily St. John Mandel‘s Year in Reading.
The Forgotten Forty
Poker Buddies BOMB
BOMB Magazine has a conversation between poker buddies Nam Le and Charles D’Ambrosio.
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MIT’s Open Documentary Lab
Andrew Phelps interviews Sarah Wolzin, director of MIT’s new Open Documentary Lab, which “brings technologists, storytellers, and scholars together to advance the new arts of documentary.” The Lab, according to Phelps, is “part think tank, part incubator for filmmakers and hackers.”
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Near to the wild heart
A charming doodle of the beautiful connecting covers for mid Clarice Lispector’s four soon-to-be-released novels. You can also buy a poster of the original from New Directions. And given how much Carolyn Kellogg enjoyed them, mentally shelving the Brazilian author beside Kafka and Joyce, and of course based on the near infinite readability of The Hour of the Star, I’m wondering if this will be the year of Lispector.
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To Kill a Reputation
Harper Lee may have died earlier this year, but the drama surrounding her final years rages on. Last week, a stage adaptation of Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird was performed in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, as it has for many years. This time, however, things got a bit contentious. Here’s a dispatch from Monroeville by Robert Rea for The Millions.
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Football Book Club: Bye Week
It’s bye week over at Football Book Club. And while there’s no new book to read this week — everybody’s resting up, licking their wounds, and sticking pins in Jay Cutler voodoo dolls — you, gentle reader, should be sure to check in for new posts on Louisa Hall’s Speak — and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.
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A Giant Otter
Depending on your perspective, this is either the best or the worst pairing of speaker to content there is: Benedict Cumberbatch reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis for the BBC. As always with Cumberbatch, the reading is a nice complement to our own Elizabeth Minkel on Sherlock.
All Voices Must Be Heard
“The last two years have given long overdue visibility to trans / non-binary realities, pushing us to re-imagine what centering the margins truly means. Being intentional, though, is more than a special issue of a literary journal for the ‘marginalized;’ it’s about creating a space for folk to curate, create, and declare their own bodies: of work, of resistance, of survival.” Editor Jayy Dodd introduces the new issue of The Offing, devoted to trans and non-binary artists. Pair with our own Sonya Chung’s piece on literary activism.
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