Elevator inspectors, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, zombie movies: these are just a few of the things that have inspired Colson Whitehead’s books over the years. For Time, Whitehead goes over each of his books and the subjects that compelled him to write them. For his upcoming novel, The Nickel Boys, he explains: “It’s about places with no accountability. That dynamic between the powerful and the helpless, where our worst impulses can be let loose.”
Colson Whitehead, Book by Book
Previews, Ctd.
If our own lengthy book preview wasn’t quite enough for your appetite, you might like the preview at Writers No One Reads. (It probably doesn’t hurt that their list includes Beckett and Borges.)
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Literary Insults
This week in book-related infographics: a look at history’s greatest literary insults, from Capote to Hemingway to Faulkner.
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And in This Corner, Weighing in at 900 Pages…
The eagle-eyed Scott Esposito alerts us to a forthcoming 900-page collection of short stories by Stephen Dixon. One hopes Fantagraphics has beefed up its copy-editing department since its last fictional behemoth, Alexander Theroux‘s Laura Warholic.
Submergence Coming to a Theater Soon?
U.S. film producers have acquired the movie option rights for J. M Ledgard’s Submergence, a book Kathryn Schulz called a “strange, intelligent, gorgeously written book” – among the best she read all of last year.
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Our Unhappy Marriage Will Be Revived in Paris
“I Have Inherited The Ancestral Home, But It Is Now A Burden Rather Than A Gift, Which Reminds Me Of Another Burden…The Institution Of Marriage” and every other Modernist novel ever written, via Mallory Ortberg of The Toast.
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