At the
FSG blog, Ryan Chapman has a discussion on the state of book jacket design with three of the best designers out there: Susan Mitchell, Charlotte Strick, and Henry Sene Yee.
At Reading Matters, Kim has featured my blog on her
Triple Choice Tuesday. My choices?
The Ghost Writer,
So Long, See You Tomorrow, and
Butcher's Crossing. Pop on over and see my fresh, brief write-up of each title.
For Independence Day, the Huffington Post has a slide show of
fifteen great independent publishers, featuring a few of my favorites --
Open Letter,
Archipelago -- and a few I didn't know about.
New Directions is a model of perfection, and I agree. I have stacks and stacks of books from these three presses, and I'm anxious to see what the others have to offer.
This year's
Berkshire Wordfest will be held at the beautiful Edith Wharton estate,
The Mount, on July 23 - 25. I will be going north that weekend, but I will be stopping at
Tarrytown, New York, for some
other fun. Still, a trip to the Berkshires is always pleasant, and a literary festival at Edith Wharton's house is a must if you're available.
Michiko Kakutani's
review of Jacob de Zoet is surprising in its lack of substance. It's mostly just a plot rehash (which I think gives away a bit too much). It's boring to read and insightless, where I usually enjoy her reviews even if I disagree (as I do here). I'm not saying my reviews are better, surely, but this is pretty poor for
The New York Times daily and from a Pulitzer-winning critic.
The PEN American Center has started its first online book club (
click here for their page). Their first book is Clarice Lispector's
The Hour of the Star, published by the great
New Directions.
In the new issue of
The New Yorker, James Wood
takes a look at The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: "This is to argue not that David Mitchell should be more like Tolstoy or Conrad or Beckett but, curiously, that he might be more Mitchellian—that the reader wants a kind of moral or metaphysical pressure that is absent, and that has ceded all the ground to pure storytelling."
KevinfromCanada features
a guest post from Kathleen Winter, author of
Anabel, which KFC also just
reviewed.
The Paris Review blog has a
Q&A with Jennifer Egan, author of
The Goon Squad, a piece of which was published in
The New Yorker and discussed
here.
Click
here for the
Never Let Me Go trailer. I didn't like the book as much as I hoped I would, but the trailer makes the film look good.
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Click here to see what's happening in the fiction of each issue of The New Yorker.
Last Five Issues:
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I’ll be very surprised if you don’t like it, Trevor!
I’m hoping to get it sooner rather than later, Lisa –I never thought I’d say this, but its winning the NBCC makes it more compelling than its winning the Booker. I’m not sure why that is as I’ve long been a huge Booker fan, and I still get anxious for each Booker season. Perhaps it’s that I didn’t trust Booker in 2009 because of 2008, and the NBCC award suggests I should have.
I think you’re quite right to put much more stock in the NBCC. I put more stock in my local school fair tombola than I do The Booker. It’s been a bit of a farce for years. They tend to get a non-lobotomised celeb involved to vogue it up a bit, and I hate all that, not to mention some disastrous, conservative, staid, trad choices as chair. And then they plump for the book they all agree they rather like, with most second-choice books triumphing. It’s all a load of balls, really. Mind you, I can’t wait for the next!