At the Believer, Michael Seidlinger asks authors about the books and writers that got them out of reading slumps. The answers vary from Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich for Lidia Yuknavitch and Claire Vaye Watkins for Amber Sparks. C Pam Zhang recalls a time when she “wanted worlds that swallowed my sense of self completely and spat me out only on the final page. And though it isn’t technically classified as horror, the one great book I remember reading during this period was Alissa Nutting’s hair-raising Tampa. Also, it made me laugh.”
The Books That Break Reading Slumps
Blind Date with Dostoevsky
At the Paris Review Daily, Elif Batuman walks us through part one of her 12-hour blind date with Dostoevsky. (via Book Bench)
The Books of Summer
Our Great Second-Half 2014 Book Preview is coming very, very soon. But to warm you up until it finally gets here, you can check out Lev Grossman’s list of “the most likely contenders” for this summer’s “It Book.”
Dispatch from North Korea
Recommended Reading: A short story collection by an anonymous North Korean author was smuggled out of the country and will be published in English next year.
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Discussing ‘A Wrinkle in Time’
Recommended reading: a piece for The Toast “In Which Three Adults Discuss A Wrinkle in Time Seriously and At Length.” Related: A Wrinkle in Time may finally become a (good) movie.
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I Choose Love
Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik has picked Nicole Krauss’s History of Love for the October selection of Book of the Month. You could also check out her Year in Reading in The Millions.
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“Fight Club 4 Kids”
There are some charming children’s books, some really bad ones, and then finally there’s Fight Club 4 Kids, which somehow manages to be both. Watch Chuck Palahniuk read the (fake) children’s version of his classic novel in this video from Mashable.
Finnegans Wake Hits Chinese Shelves
I don’t know how they managed to translate the thunderwords into Chinese, but if sales figures indicate success, they did a bang up job. Finnegans Wake is huge in China right now.
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Menswear and Books
Jason Diamond looks at why “books are in [such] abundant supply in the menswear world.”