The Detroit News on Julia Reyes Taubman’s photobook Detroit: 138 Square Miles If you’re looking to read one piece on skateboarding that has a Don DeLillo quote, The Classical has got you covered. Two of our favorites, Deborah Eisenberg and Emma Straub, tell us about their year in reading at The Millions. Vogue picks their best books of 2011. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News: Meh or pretty okay? The books that Lev Grossman is looking forward to in 2012. Pictures from a Pop Up Flea. Singer […]
Morning Bites: Tranströmer takeover, Roth’s consolation prize, Lev Grossman TV, and more
Real talk: Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize for literature, and we’ve never read any of his work. But that doesn’t stop us from thinking the cover for his “20 Poems” is really cool. Philip Roth didn’t win (again…), but he’s been shortlisted for an award celebrating medicine in literature. Steve Jobs gave us our choice of fonts. This whole Lev Grossman book becoming a movie thing is really awesome news. Joshua Cohen says Yizkor (remembrance) for books. Ethan Nosowsky […]
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 […]
Indexing: Brontë for kicks, Lipsyte update, James Salter, The Brothers Karamazov, and more
Spending money on Spotify, reading something for kicks, Lev Grossman, Law and Order, and so much more of what is interesting folks in Vol. 1 land.
Review: Lev Grossman’s “The Magician King”
Reviewed by Emily Goldsher The Magician King By Lev Grossman Viking, 416 p. I have to confess, I hadn’t read The Magicians until The Magician King made it into my hands–so my experience of getting to know Quentin, Lev Grossman’s magically-inclined protagonist, was quite rapid and a bit obsessive. I didn’t suffer the wait between the two books, so I didn’t have to give the first book much thought before undertaking the second. Still, there is a clear sea change […]
Morning Bites: Lev Grossman’s mixtape, Sholem Asch, lady punks, and more
Lev Grossman digs some Colin Meloy, Twilight goes 8 bit, new media and old are to blame in the London riots, and more.
Things Written About “The Unwritten”
Posted by Tobias Carroll Over at Techland, a quartet of smart writers takes a look at Inside Man, the second collection of Mike Carey and Peter Gross’s comic book The Unwritten. The first collection, Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity, suggested that the series would be something resembling a metafictional take on the Harry Potter phenomenon. This volume suggests that Carey and Gross’s concerns are far more ambitious — and, as Techland’s roundtable suggests, this has benefits and drawbacks. (One […]
Franzen on Time Magazine Cover: First Author in Ten Years, Possibly the Last one Ever?
I was happy that Lev Grossman pulled some magic (get it?), and got Jonathan Franzen on the cover of Time. I haven’t read the article yet, and I’m not really sure how many people actually read Time (a lot? A lot less than ten years ago?), but it seems like a step in the right direction. And I hate to ask, but I wonder if it will be the last time an author graces the front page of the magazine […]