TODAY: In 1990, Argentine author Manuel Puig dies.
- The first official trailer for Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time adaptation has been released. | YouTube
- In response to the news about a potential bidding war for James Comey’s book, former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page has announced his own project, which he claims will “prove infinitely more accurate, exciting and insightful.” | The New York Times BuzzFeed News
- A host of other political books have also been announced, with authors ranging from Hillary Clinton to a former White House stenographer. | The New York Times
- Catherine Lacey remembers the Cy Twombly exhibition that left her “in love, however briefly, with an entire building and all of its contents.” | The Paris Review
- “I’d rather point out the abundance of mystery than pretend to solve it. As if I could solve it!” Rumaan Alam interviews The Dark Dark author Samantha Hunt. | The Rumpus
- On Yale undergraduate Rebecca Shoptaw’s gender-bending web series adaptation of Middlemarch, “worth watching for its ambition as well as for its charm.” | The New Yorker
- “A certain suspicion of explanation, particularly biographical explanation, has been at the core of his aesthetic.” On the surprising appearance of a John Ashbery biography. | The New Republic
- “Everything was black. Only the blood was another color . . . ” An excerpt from Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War. | VICE
- “As a novelist, I never want to write about ‘issues’ like ‘the Indian family.’ What I want to write about is the air we breathe.” An interview with Arundhati Roy. | The Nation
- On the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, the Bank of England unveiled a (controversial, but not for the reasons you might expect) new banknote bearing her likeness. | NPR
- When a bookseller’s moral and political unease about J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy comes into conflict with “that old chestnut about the customer always being right.” | The Millions
- “They ain’t all bedtime stories,” says Keanu Reeves of X Artists’ Books, the independent press he’s launching with artist Alexandre Grant and designer Jessica Fleischmann. | Los Angeles Times
- The tides have turned since the Brontë sisters and George Elliot were publishing under manly names: Men are now adopting androgynous pseudonyms to sell psychological thrillers. | Jezebel
- “I feel like so much of contemporary loneliness in motion is this compulsion to share my web browser.” Eileen Myles, Melissa Broder, and other writers and artists on using social media as a creative tool. | The Creative Independent
- “If you’d never been to an actual wedding, and had gathered your ideas about their nature from fiction alone, you would imagine them as sites of unremitting carnage and despair.” On the depiction of weddings in novels. | The Cut
Jane Austen’s most widely mocked character is also her most subversive: In defense of Mrs. Bennet · David Burr Gerard on his literary influences: Joyce, Kafka, and Grover · A woman alone in London: On the literature of solitude · Sujatha Gidla on growing up as an untouchable · James Baldwin vs. William F. Buckley: A debate we shouldn’t need, as important as ever · Rebecca Solnit on a childhood of reading and wandering · What Terry McDonell learned from editing Hunter S. Thompson · The lies we tell ourselves about gentrification: Brandon Harris on a decade of magical thinking in Bed-Stuy · 10 essential road trip books that aren’t On the Road · Celebrities—they’re not just like us: On Julie Klam’s The Stars in Our Eyes
Best of Book Marks:
Back in 2008, The New York Times deemed Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo “a thoroughly ugly view of human nature” · “It sounded like a bone breaking”: On Walter Mosley’s first Easy Rawlins mystery novel, Devil in a Blue Dress · “Yeats has not brought his poetry down; he has raised man up”: A 1928 review of W.B. Yeats’ The Tower · Meet Renée Ballard: Michael Connelly’s new heroine · On the anniversary of the Moon landing, we look back at another iconic lunar story: Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon · Long before the series became a global phenomenon, the original reviews of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones · Michael Connelly, Rachel Khong, and Steve Bannon all feature among our best-reviewed books of the week
