August 13, 2012 On the Shelf Rich Writers, Niche Bookstores, Darwin By Sadie Stein Check out the handmade books of Berlin-based Palefroi. Maria Papova presents the literary jukebox, in which quotes are matched to thematic songs. Forbes lists the highest-grossing authors. A salute to niche bookstores of the world. The fate of dead books: a history of pulping. Prior to proposing to Emma Wedgwood, Charles Darwin did a cost-benefit analysis of marriage, with one of the deficits listed as “less money for books.” [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 10, 2012 Books In Which the Author Reads the Works of Albert Cossery: An Illustrated Essay By Nathan Gelgud Pause Play Play Prev | Next Nathan Gelgud is an illustrator who lives in Brooklyn. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 10, 2012 In Memoriam David Rakoff, 1964–2012 By Lorin Stein We are sad to learn of the death of David Rakoff, at forty-seven, after a long battle with cancer. Rakoff’s essays and contributions to This American Life include what must be the most melancholy humor writing of our time, or else the funniest melancholy writing. Even at his most arch, Rakoff wrote with an undertone of kindness that made his fans love him. Many of his readers will feel that they have lost a friend. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 10, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Old New York, The Boss, SodaStream By The Paris Review I didn’t think I would ever read another book about Henry James. But here I am, three quarters of the way through Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel, a book-length study—or really, essay—on The Portrait of a Lady. It reads like an old-fashioned work of belles lettres, combining biography, travelogue, and literary history (plus a good deal of helpful synopsis) to explain how and why James wrote his best-loved novel. The explanation is full of grace and deep learning lightly worn. Yet Gorra takes for granted James’s homosexuality, and his sexual knowledge, as well-established facts. In this sense, it is a book of our moment, a hi-def image of the Master coming into his own. —Lorin Stein The host, for some reason, was taking Instamatic pictures of his guests. It was not clear whether he was doing this in order to be able to show, at some future time, that there had been this gathering in his house. Or whether he thought of pictures in some voodoo sense. Or whether he found it difficult to talk. Or whether he was bored. Two underground celebrities—one of whom had become a sensation by never generating or exhibiting a flicker of interest in anything, the other of whom was known mainly for hanging around the first—were taking pictures too. I have Lorin to thank for introducing me to Renata Adler’s 1976 first novel, Speedboat. Maybe its unconventional structure (a series of vignettes) and plotline (there isn’t really one) are not for everyone. But for sheer linguistic pleasure, fierce intelligence, and a vivid picture of seventies New York, look no further. I breezed through it in a day and have been recommending it left and right with the kind of excitement I haven’t felt in a long time.—Sadie O. Stein Bruce Springsteen’s music is the Staff Pick of my heart. “Bobby Jean” and “Secret Garden” give tremble to the word rock, while “Born to Run” accomplishes something in music that Holden Caulfield did in literature, honestly portraying the anxiety of adolescence in a desire to escape. The New Yorker’s profile of Bruce Springsteen is a breathtaking homage to the now sixty-two-year-old rocker, who is set to embark on yet another world tour. The piece follows a young Springsteen watching Elvis on the black-and-white telly, takes us through his years of top-forty glory and out into a political movement that gave hope to the country. The profile shows that there is still heart in the music industry—even if that heart was born in Jersey. —Noah Wunsch Read More
August 10, 2012 On the Shelf Conrad Signals, Server Signs By Sadie Stein Because it is Friday, a Joseph Conrad bat signal. A pair of Irish researchers have determined that Homer’s epics are (partially) based in fact. “We’re not saying that this or that actually happened, or even that the individual people portrayed in the stories are real … We are saying that the overall society (that emerges from the stories) and interactions between characters seem realistic.” The son of John Steinbeck has publicly objected to the invocation of Of Mice and Men to justify the Texas execution of a mentally handicapped man. Celebrate Julia Child’s centenary with these ten titles. If you wish to rakishly mix your media, here is how to make a screen saver from your favorite book cover. The secret language of restaurants; or, how your waiter knows who gets what. And how did you celebrate Book Lover’s Day? [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 9, 2012 At Work Larger Than Life: An Interview with Will Self By Jacques Testard Last August, I interviewed Will Self—whose latest novel Umbrella has just been long-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize—in his London home. I had been given two weeks to prepare and I was quite terrified. My terror was warranted; I had spent the last ten days immersed in his hallucinatory fictional worlds, composed of seven novels, three novellas, and countless short stories. Through these parallel and often overlapping fictions, Self has constructed a relentless critique of our institutional failings, hypocritical cultural mores, and political inadequacies. My fears, notwithstanding being intellectually dwarfed, were largely to do with the sheer madness of many of his writings. Here was the writer who, over the years, had invented: 1. A man who wakes up with a vagina behind his left knee and has an affair with his (male) GP (Bull: A Farce); 2. A parallel Earth populated by nymphomaniacal and exhibitionist apes seen through the eyes of its most prominent experimental psychiatrists (Great Apes); 3. The afterlife taking place in the purgatorial London district of “Dulston,” a suburb populated uniquely by senseless, chain-smoking dead people, haunted by their aborted fetuses and old neuroses, and living out the rest of infinity in dire office jobs (How the Dead Live); 4. A postapocalyptic London governed by a religion based on a cab driver named Dave’s insane writings to his estranged son in the 2000s (The Book of Dave). And then there was the public figure—an acerbic satirist of towering intellect, a giant man of letters with a rhetorical bite strong enough to tear a lesser being apart. By the time I rang on the doorbell, Will Self had, to my mind, transmogrified into The Fat Controller—the Mephistophelian antihero in his My Idea of Fun—ready to shred me from limb to limb for my idiotic questions and inadequate readings. Read More