This week, The New Yorker published their first ever science fiction issue, filled with speculative stories from popular authors, many not necessarily known for their sci-fi writing: Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Sam Lipsyte, Jonathan Lethem. In truth, we’re kind of amazed that it took The New Yorker this long to do a science fiction issue, but that doesn’t make us any less psyched to delve into it. However, we’ve heard more than one mutinous grumble from readers who don’t like — or think they don’t like — the genre, and consider this week’s issue a waste. In an attempt to convert them (though probably not before the next week’s issue comes out), we’ve put together this list of sci-fi books for people who don’t read sci-fi books. Whether you’re curious but not sure where to start or you’ve decided along the way that you just can’t stomach the stuff (read: you need to be tricked and cajoled), we have a book for you here, so click through and get to expanding your horizons. And hey, sci-fi buffs: be sure to add to our list in the comments! … Read More
Jonathan Lethem
Paris, I Love You: 10 Books Starring Cities
Today marks the release of Rosecrans Baldwin’s sophomore effort Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down, a memoir about moving to his favorite city in the world. As might be expected, the City of Light itself plays as much of a role as any other character Baldwin encounters — we’d almost consider it to be a book with two main characters: Baldwin and Paris. We’re always interested in the ways real cities blend into fiction and take on lives of their own, so we came up with a list of a few other books starring metropolises around the world. Click through to check out ten books in which the cities characters inhabit become characters in themselves, and let us know if we missed any of your favorites in the comments. … Read More
Read an Excerpt of Jonathan Lethem’s Book About Talking Heads
“Recommendation: When using this product, actually listening to the record is strongly indicated. I don’t mean just on those crappy little speakers built into your computer, either. And turn it up, for fuck’s sake.” Those are the instructions that greet the reader of Jonathan Lethem’s Fear of Music, a book about the Talking… Read More
10 Evocative Writers of Place
Today is famed Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s 84th birthday. Known for his importance in developing the genre of magical realism as well as his lush descriptions of an often only slightly shifted Colombia, Márquez has created some of the most beautiful worlds of any writer living today. In the introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, author Carlos Fuentes writes, “[Márquez] creates a place. A mythical locale: Macondo. García Márquez, story-teller, knows that presence dissolves without a place (a base of resistance) that can be all places: a place that will hold everyone, that will hold all of us: the seat of time, she enshrinement of all times, the meeting ground of memory and desire, a common present where everything can begin again: a temple, a book.”
Indeed, place can be one of the most important ingredients in a novel or story, and since we associate Márquez so deeply with the Colombia he has created for us, we decided to take a look at more authors who are tied to a specific place, and whose work relies on a strong evocation of that land, whether foreign or domestic. Click through to take a look at our ten favorite writers of place, and let us know if we’ve missed your favorite in the comments. … Read More
5 Recipes Inspired by Your Favorite Novels
It’s pretty much a no-brainer why we love something like The Book Club Cookbook – it combines two of our all-time favorite things: food and books. Even better — the recipes in the book let us get a fuller experience of our favorite novels by thinking up recipes either inspired by the story or literally contributed by the author as essential to the book. We’ve excerpted five of our favorite recipes from the forthcoming updated edition of The Book Club Cookbook, which offers a host of recipes inspired by literature (as well as book club talking points, natch), including those below as well as others from novels like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Room, Jane Eyre, and even The Age of Innocence. Click through to read (and make!) a few of our favorite recipes, including commentary from the cookbook’s authors on both the book and the food. Bon Appetit! … Read More
National Book Critics Circle 2011 Finalists Announced
Last night, at an event held at Artists Space in downtown Manhattan, the National Book Critics Circle announced its finalists in six categories — autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry — for the 2011 publishing year. The NBCC Awards are singular in that they are the only awards chosen by the critics themselves, seeking every year to “honor the best literature published in English” as well as to “foster a national conversation about reading, criticism and literature.” The winners will be announced at a ceremony on March 8th, 2012, but for now, click through to see the nominees and let us know which ones you’re rooting for — or whether you think they completely missed the mark. … Read More
Contemporary Literature's Greatest Geeks
There’s no polite way to say it. The star of Roberto Bolaño’s long-awaited novel, The Third Reich, is a geek — a gamer geek, to be precise. And it’s the real-world implications of his all-consuming pastime that underlie the book’s action, even as he relaxes on the beach with his beautiful girlfriend and parties into the night with new friends. The immense role gaming plays in Bolaño’s atmospheric, slow-burning novel, written before The Savage Detectives and 2666 and serialized by The Paris Review in advance of its publication last month, got us thinking about the many memorable geeks contemporary literature has given us. A selection of our favorites is after the jump; add yours in the comments. … Read More
Highbrow Beef: Jonathan Lethem vs. James Wood
“I’d have taken a much worse evaluation from [James] Wood than I got, if it had seemed precise and upstanding,” writes Jonathan Lethem in a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books. “I wanted to learn something about my work. Instead I learned about Wood. The letdown startled me.” Although Lethem’s piece… Read More
10 New Must-Reads for November
It’s the first of the month, and you know what that means: a brand new spate of new literary releases to delve into. Not that we mind — the weather’s getting brisker (not to mention those snowstorms, NYC), and we really can’t think of anything better to do than to curl up with a cup of hot cider and a great novel (or memoir, or book of essays, or short story collection). Don’t be put off by the number of big names on our list this month — we like a struggling first novel as much as the next blog, but November is the month for publishers to pull out their big guns, and boy have they ever. Click through to see our list of ten must-reads coming out this month, and let us know which books you’re most psyched to dig into in the comments. … Read More
Literary Love Letters to Brooklyn
This week marked the release of Literary Brooklyn by Evan Hughes, a new chronicle of the borough’s literary history and author residents, which is getting some serious buzz. We’re excited to read it, but to tide ourselves over we thought we’d continue our literary love letters series with a collections of odes to the “rougher” side of the river. We’ve pulled from fiction and essays by residents and non-residents, but Brooklyn lovers all. Add your own favorite passages about Brooklyn in the comments, or feel free to make up your own odes to our fair city. How many words rhyme with ‘hipster?’ … Read More
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