After nearly a decade, Elizabeth Strout is revisiting her character Olive Kitteridge in a new book, Olive, Again. Its predecessor, Olive Kitteridge, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize and gained some rather fervent fans. Strout discussed the character’s surprising popularity with Emma Brockes at the Guardian. “Ever since I was a child, I always wanted to know what it felt like to be another person,” Strout says. “That’s the engine that has propelled me. What does it feel like to be that person, sitting on the subway – I can see her trousers are a little snug so I know what that would feel like. I would spend so much time trying to figure out what it feels like to be another person.”
Revisiting Olive with Elizabeth Strout
They Really Get Me
For an invigorating jolt of proletarian/genetic bitterness, The New York Times has a “New Victorian” fashion slide show, featuring a selection of gentlemen with admirable bone structure, all in thousand-dollar cutaway coats and plaids and things.
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Karen Joy Fowler wins 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award
Karen Joy Fowler has won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. A celebratory dinner will be held in her honor on May 10.
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Punner Pens Publication
1995 Pun-making champion of the world (and Clinton speechwriter) John Pollack explores the history and meaning of the pun in his new book, The Pun Also Rises, reviewed here.
Football Book Club: ‘The Sixth Extinction’
Football Book Club is back from its relaxing bye week — and in preparation of the impending Environmental End Times, these truly decent, patriotic human beings are reading The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. So pick up your copy today, read along, and learn how we’re fucking up the planet in ways you never even imagined possible. Also: if this week’s book is making you feel slightly depressed and/or down in the dumps and/or bummed, check back with FBC all week for essays on Speak by Louisa Hall.
Tuesday New Release Day
Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow is out today (Kakutani sez, “remarkably tedious” but The Guardian adds, “Amis might draw comfort from the long and distinguished list of Kakutani’s literary victims.”) Also out, Sebastian Junger’s War, the result of time spent embedded with a platoon of the 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan.
omg omg omg
The first known use of O.M.G. was in 1917, in a letter sent to Winston Churchill.