Afternoon Links for Februrary 14, 2012, featuring Djuna Barnes, Geoff Dyer, Steve Erickson, and more.
Indexing: How much Wodehouse can you take(?), Cannery Row, Lispector, L.A. Review of Books podcast, and much more
A roundup of things consumed by our contributors. Tobias Carroll We’ve got two weeks of reading here. This….might take a while. Though it’s a strange cosmic joke that I made my way through the 850-page novel on the list to follow faster than nearly everything else on it.
A year of favorites: Tobias’s Best Of 2011
Posted by Tobias Carroll This is the first of two lists of the books I read this year that I most enjoyed. This one focuses on books released this year; the other will focus around books that I encountered for the first time in 2011 that first entered the world in preceding years. [fragments] Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia is an intentionally messy book with shifting and sometimes overlapping narrators and a sense of history, both familial and musical, looming in […]
Morning Bites: 100 years of Patchen, Downton Abbey Booker Prize, Vanessa Veselka, Yoram Kaniuk’s movement, and more
Poet Kenneth Patchen was born 100 years ago on this day. Matthew Crawley is judging next year’s Booker Prize! (You have to watch Downton Abbey for this to matter. Also, if you haven’t seen season two, there’s a major spoiler. Tread lightly.) How Vanessa Veselka tried to unionize Amazon. Novelist Yoram Kaniuk started a movement when he sued to become the first Israeli citizen “without religion.” (You should consider reading his book Life on Sandpaper, which is on Dalkey.) Chloe Caldwell […]
Morning Bites: Lovecraft turns 120, Grossman and the Woolfs, Finnish Bellow, and more
Tomorrow, August 20th, is the 120th birthday of H.P. Lovecraft. Lev Grossman talks some Virginia Woolf. Remember last year when he wrote about Virginia’s husband in The Believer? (We’re just trying to give you things to read this weekend.) The short list is announced for the St. Francis literary prize. The writers and their nominated books are: Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination; Joshua Cohen, Witz; Jonathan Dee, The Privileges; Yiyun Li, Gold Boy Emerald Girl; Marlene van Niekerk, Agaat; and Brad […]