For the New York Times, Katie Kitamura discusses her latest novel, Intimacies, with Brandon Yu and how its story embraces uncertainty as a constant in our lives. “There’s a real cognitive dissonance as a person in the world,” Kitamura says. “Your consciousness can only accommodate so much, and certainly it’s been incredible to me how I can simultaneously be very worried about the state of democracy and also thinking, has the turkey gone off?”
Katie Kitamura on Embracing the Persistent Doom
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We lost another great one this week in Alan Rickman. He will be remembered forever by fans of the Harry Potter series as the maybe-evil, maybe-heroic professor Severus Snape, but the Potter series wasn’t Rickman’s only brush with the literary. Here are a few recordings of him reading from Shakespeare, Proust, and Thomas Hardy.
Digital Tolstoy
“Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s entire body of work – all 90 volumes – along with comprehensive biographical materials has been posted online and will be available for free, a descendant said.”
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Rest in Power
“Everyone who’s been reading the manuscript is in tears by the second chapter.” Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, parents of Trayvon Martin, have signed a deal to publish a book titled Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin; its release is scheduled for January 31, 2017. Might we also recommend Ismail Muhammad‘s piece from earlier this week on Frank Ocean, “looking again,” and the black male body – you’ll feel more whole for having read it.
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Why So Socialist?
Have you seen the infamous image of Obama in Heath Ledger-style Joker makeup? (Image care of Bedlam Magazine). See the artist, unmasked, at the L.A. Times.
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Tiny Worlds
Recommended Reading: On the great depth and detail of tiny worlds in Ploughshares. An example of these worlds, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories takes short fiction “to the extreme.”
Struggle on Stage
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle will be adapted to the stage — all 3,600 pages in under 150 minutes. Pair with Jonathan Callahan’s Millions review.
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