Thanksgiving Weekend (and Hanukkah Week) Is a Weekend (Week) for Reading
Thanks to a blown out tire, which forced me to spend most of last Friday riding in a tow truck and sitting in a tire shop, I didn’t have a chance to write my weekly Weekend Reading post.1 So this week, I’m going to triple up on the normal post and write about the three books I hope to spend the next four days ...
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Giving Thanks for This Review of "The Dark" by Sergio Chejfec
Yesterday, P. T. Smith’s insightful review of Chejfec’s new novel The Dark was published on BOMB’s website: Much of the response to Sergio Chejfec’s English-language debut, My Two Worlds, published in 2011 by Open Letter, placed him squarely in a Sebaldian camp. The narrator is on a walk, reminiscing ...
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"Words Without Borders: The Best of the First Ten Years" [A Book to Buy]
The other week, we mentioned the Words Without Borders gala celebrating their first ten years of existence. Well, to celebrate their first 10 years, WWB has released a special anthology that’s definitely worth buying—not only because it’s loaded with great writing, but also because sales of this volume go ...
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Help Get an Open Letter Book into TMN's Tournament of Books (And I'll Help You)
For the past ten years, The Morning News hosts the Tournament of Books, a March Madness of sorts for works of fiction. Every bracket matchup is decided by a blogger/writer/critic/minor celebrity who picks between the two books on merit, readability, cover design, weight, other intangibles—whatever they want. As a ...
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Seiobo There Below
In Seiobo There Below, Lázló Krasznahorkai is able to succeed at a task at which many writers fail: to dedicate an entire novel to a single message, to express an idea over and over again without falling into repetition or didacticism. His novel is an insistence that the rapturous does exist, can be met, and that, although ...
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Zachary Karabashliev and the Texas Book Festival
Zachary Karabashliev, author of the wildly fun 18% Gray recently participated in the Texas Book Festival in Austin. According to the dozen or so friends I know who attended, it sounded like a real blast. So I thought I’d ask Zach a few questions about his experience, and share some of his photographs. (If you’ve ...
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Arnon Grunberg's "The Quantified Writer" Project
I don’t know much about this Quantified Writer Project, but seeing that it combines two of my favorite things—Arnon Grunberg’s work and neuroscience—I feel like I really should. Here’s the basic description from Arnon’s website: Dutch author Arnon Grunberg and his publishing house, ...
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