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
The Marriage Plot Problem
Have novels about love lost their gravitas as women’s liberation and divorce culture have taken over? Adelle Waldman doesn’t think so. In The New Yorker, she defends the timelessness of the marriage plot. “As long as marriage and love and relationships have high stakes for us emotionally, they have the potential to offer rich subject material for novelists, no matter how flimsy or comparatively uninteresting contemporary relationships seem on their surface.” Pair with: Our Jeffrey Eugenides essay on writing The Marriage Plot, which is referenced several times in Waldman’s essay.
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Sylvester Stallone, 35 Years of Paintings
“The State Russian Art Museum in St. Petersburg is hosting an exhibition of paintings by Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone.”
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Don’t Be Her
Want to be a female travel writer? That’s great, says Jessa Crispin, just please don’t be Elizabeth Gilbert.
The Belletristic Branch
At the Poetry Foundation’s website, a list of twelve poets that captivated American presidents.
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Some Links
The Poetry Archive: “The Poetry Archive is the world’s premier online collection of recordings of poets reading their work. You can enjoy listening here, free of charge, to the voices of contemporary English-language poets and of poets from the past.”A few days ago the New York Times released its usual 100 book “Notable” list, but now we get the really good stuff: the Times top ten of the year. The big surprise: an appearance by Curtis Sittenfeld’s “calm and memorably incisive first novel,” Prep.Scott and Ed and others have already noted this, but I just got around to reading it: the NYRB piece on our latest National Book Award winner, William T. Vollmann.Also noted by many litblogs, the ever-multitasking Bud has launched a sleek litblog network/aggregator/community: MetaxuCafe. Very cool.
87th Annual California Book Awards Finalists
The 87th annual California Book Awards, which “recognizes the state’s best writers and illuminate the wealth and diversity of literature written in California,” announced this year’s finalists. The nominees include Rachel Khong‘s Goodbye, Vitamin, Viet Thanh Nguyen‘s The Refugees, and Zinzi Clemmons‘s What We Lose (here’s the full list). From our archives: The Millions’ interview with Khong.
