“The nice thing about talking to undergrads is that they are not stressed out yet about publication…Their love is still pure, and it’s very energizing.” For Lithub, R.O. Kwon talks to Maris Kreizman about book tours at colleges, losing religion, and her novel, The Incendiaries, now out in paperback. Pair with Kwon’s excellent Year in Reading entry from a couple years back.
R.O. Kwon Takes Faith Seriously
Chris Ware’s Radical Honesty
Hannah Means-Shannon shares a dispatch from the Rocky Mountain Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels in which Building Stories author (and Year in Reading alum) Chris Ware discusses his creative processes.
Read All About It
“No matter who we’re horny to blame for our great national nightmare today, the Washington Post is offering a solution.” The Awl reports that The Washington Post is offering free digital subscriptions for students, the military, and government employers.
Tuesday New Releases – Dan Brown Edition
Booksellers across the country have loaded up dollies with towers of boxes and carted them to the front of the store. Amazon has broken into its super-secret, double-locked, chain-link fence. Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is here. Understandably, other publishers have ceded this Tuesday almost entirely to the Dan Brown hype machine, but those looking for something (very) different can today find Joyce Carol Oates doing the zombie thing (not really) and the latest from Tao Lin.
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On Negative Book Reviews
“An appeal for the revival of the negative book review, then, is a remonstration against forced and foppish praise, where everything is good and so nothing at all is good.” In The Baffler, Rafia Zakaria writes in praise of negative book reviews and decries the “enfeebling of literary criticism.” From our archives: our own Emily St. John Mandel writes about bad book reviews.
Say That Again?
Duncan Murrell has a new essay up on the Harper’s Magazine blog about how difficult it is for journalists to speak to their sources through interpreters. “I became concerned that my interpreters were not delivering my words in the way I delivered them and in precisely the way I meant them,” he writes.
In Search of Proust
Translating is notoriously difficult work, and translating Proust even more so. The Boston Review has published a very thoughtful piece about the history of In Search of Lost Time in English, the trouble with annotations, and the general “tension in translation between the spirit and the letter.” We highly recommend you take the time to read it, even if you don’t have time for Proust just yet.
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McCarthy, Literary Idol
“In addition to fearing, as a young person, that I lacked sophistication, I also feared that I lacked courage. It was hard for me to say something even mildly tough about someone else or their work; hard for me, generally, to be critical. Mary McCarthy had no such trouble.” Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings, writes about her literary idol for the LA Times.
The Deepest Feeling
“Love / is the only fortress / strong enough to trust to.” Mary-Kay Wilmers for the London Review of Books reviews Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore. In the book, Moore’s slightly-bizarre domestic life is examined with fairness and honesty alongside her impressive body of work. If poetry is your thing, check out our On Poetry column for more.
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