- Daniel Olivas interviews Salvador Plascencia.
- Lev Grossman on the Ian McEwan mess: “The disparity between the greatness of McEwan’s achievement and the pettiness of this complaint is vertiginous. That McEwan even bothered to answer the charges is gobsmacking.”
- Five novels for your inner drunk. (via Books Inq.)
- 75 Books? Try committing 100 poems to memory over a year. (via Bookninja)
- Terry Teachout, “In the Mood.”
- Just when you thought the Madonna adoption flap couldn’t get any more ridiculous, it goes into overdrive.
- Occasional Superheroine: an essential blog chronicling women’s issues in comics, as experienced by former DC/Valiant editor Valerie D’Orazio. (via The Beat)
- Pirate illustrations from Patricia Storms.
- Chasing Ray has kickstarted a series looking into books about writing.
- The Zuckerman Cycle will come to an end.
- George Saunders on Borat.
- Michael Allen on page layout.
- If you haven’t been reading Derik Badman‘s series, “Rethinking Transitions,” comic makers take note.
- The justice system works! (via Syntax of Things)
- Everything you could possibly want to know about Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.
- Wondering how you can maneuver your way onto the Costa shortlist? Try cancer.
- What goes on at Beatrice Monti’s writers colony?
- Man, poor Ngugi wa Thiong’o just can’t get a break. In addition to the Vitale incident, four guys tried to rob him a few years ago in Nairobi.
- No surprise. On the book digitizing front, Yahoo doesn’t like Google.
- Kevin Sampsell devises new literary terms. This sounds suspiciously similar to the Literary Hipster’s Handbook!
- Adam Rogers eavesdrops on BSG‘s writers. (via Locus)
- Jenny Davidson’s “The Other Amazon.”
- Professor Fury’s “Songs I Couldn’t Get Out of My Head in 2006.”
Talk about a veritable cyberlynching. First Gawker, now Kevin Sampsell.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
I love the roundup posts. One-stop shopping.
Saunders jumps the shark in that Shouts & Murmmurs piece. For a guy who writes funny stuff himself, the piece looks like the work of a humorless tool. I first saw it linked (approvingly) on the National Review website, which is a bad sign for ol’ George.
“gobsmacking” — hmph