“Over four seasons, ‘Younger’ became a ‘Gossip Girl’ for the publishing industry—a glossy, winking take on a bounded universe of writers and editors and marketing campaigns.” If you need a show and love literary references, Younger might be the way to go.
xoxo Liza
A Presidential Conversation Continued
We highlighted the first installment of President Obama’s conversation with Marilynne Robinson, published in The New York Review of Books. Part II is now here. We have a few pieces on Robinson to pair with it.
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Jack Gilbert Dies at the Age of 87
Jack Gilbert died yesterday at the age of 87. Gilbert was the author of five standalone poetry collections—as well as additional collected volumes such as last March’s Collected Poems—and he was also a past winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award. For The LA Times, John Penner reviews the poet’s legacy. Or, perhaps as fitting tribute to Gilbert’s life and work, better to hear his own final lines to the poem “Failing and Flying”: “I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, / but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
From Chernobyl
Recommended Reading: An excerpt from Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster at n+1. Read more about Alexievich at The Millions.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Cronin; Danler; Anderson; Busquets; Thorpe; Vyleta
Out this week: The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin; Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler; The Summer Guest by Alison Anderson; This Too Shall Pass by Milena Busquets; Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe; and Smoke by Dan Vyleta. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
What Seems Obvious Is Often Refuted
A new study indicates that when it comes to National Endowment for the Arts grants, “there is not a disproportionate benefit to wealthy individuals.” In fact, the grants often benefit both the rich and poor alike.
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Redefining Our Image of Book Collectors
This past Monday The Paris Review revealed the winners of the first annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting prize. This prize is different from the average literary prize because it focuses on celebrating women under 30 who have a passion for collecting books. The prize was created by the Brooklyn bookstore, Honey & Wax. The owners “O’Donnell and Romney had observed that although the young women who entered their store were passionate about their collections, they rarely referred to themselves as collectors. Their hope is to ‘encourage young women who are actively collecting books to own and share that part of their lives, and to think strategically about the future of their collections.’” Meet the women and their incredible collections here and pair it with our post on the complete archives of The Paris Review.
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Time to Grow Up
What’s behind the rise of the new-adult genre of fiction? You could blame the rise of Millennials, but that would be, as Emily Landau argues in a piece for the Canadian magazine The Walrus, too cheap and reductive to really answer the question. Instead, she says that we should look at NA as fundamentally similar to YA, with the main difference being that NA books portrays characters on the cusp of independence. (Related: we polled a group of high school students to find out their favorite YA books of 2013.)
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An Imagined Country
“The immigrant who arrives too late in life to adapt to his new country, but too early to survive on nostalgia for the old country, has to create a third, imagined country to live in.” Peter Pomerantsev writes for the London Review of Books about Brighton Beach, Russian immigrants and a “self-made America.” Pair with Matthew Wolfson‘s review of Yelena Akhtiorskaya‘s novel of Brighton Beach and Odessa, Panic in a Suitcase.
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