Game of Thrones is dead. Er, over. Oh no! What to read now? Over at Electric Literature, Seth D. Michaels has you covered, suggesting a list of books to read post-GoT that includes work by N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, and Kirstin Downey. “At its best,” Michaels writes, the original book series “is both a page-turning adventure and a revisionist fantasy, surfacing some of the hard questions underneath the tropes of the genre. Who has a legitimate claim on power, and what can they do with it? How does the past determine and constrain today? How can women exert power in a cruel and oppressive world? How do personal relationships shape politics, and vice-versa?”
Books for a Post-‘Game of Thrones’ World
Silly Prizes
In a piece with which our own Mark O’Connell probably agrees, Tim Parks explains the Nobel Prize for Literature’s inherent silliness.
●
●
A Disturbance in the Force of the Joyce Estate
Our own Mark O’Connell likens James Joyce’s grandson to a “highbrow Darth Vader.”
●
●
Norman Mailer Slept Here
You can purchase Norman Mailer’s Provincetown home for the cool price of $3.9 million. The house was previously used for the Norman Mailer Center’s Summer Writers Colony, which Millions contributor A. Igoni Barrett attended and wrote about for Electric Literature.
●
●
The Strand Says Goodbye
“By the time Mr. Bass bought the building for $8.2 million in 1997, the Strand had become the largest used-book store in the world.” Fred Bass, the owner of the Strand, has died at the age of 89. Bass — who bought used books with panicked fervor, opened up satellite kiosks, and created the fabled literary quiz for prospective employees — turned his father’s used bookstores into a New York City literary landmark.
Payday
Recommended Reading: Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin on writing for free (or not).
●
●
Clickity Clack
Where did Modernism come from? Did it spring from the alienation engendered by the nineteenth century? Or did it spring instead from — as Hannah Sullivan argues in her new book, The Work of Revision — the typewriter?
●
●