Open Letter Books on FB, again . . .
You may (or may not) already be a member of the Open Letter group on Facebook (which is great), but we’re quickly migrating the fun(!) over to our Facebook fan page, where we’ll be able to better keep you up-to-date during your daily Facebooking, and (importantly) we can better hear back from you, give out free ...
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Cool Russian Books (And Journals)
One of the most interesting journals I’ve heard about recently is Chtenia: Readings from Russia a very well-produced publication that features a wide range of works by Russian authors, from classic authors to new voices. And it includes not just fiction (although they do claim to be the “only regularly published ...
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Normance
When a reader, and I mean a true reader looking for guts, the unexpected and the challenging, encounters Céline, she knows that her literary fate is forever changed. Gather your beatniks, your cynics, your semi-autobiographers and toss in a dirty handful of John Kennedy Toole and this might give an idea of what reading ...
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Another Guardian Top Ten List
In addition to Selcuk Altan’s Turkish lit list, The Guardian also posted a top ten list of books about the Berlin Wall. Suzanne Munshower’s list—which is presented in a narrative format with interesting details about each of the books—actually overlaps a bit with The Wall in My Head the book about ...
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Selcuk Altun's Turkish Lit Recommendations
To mark the English-language release of Selcuk Altun’s new novel, Many and Many a Year Ago, The Guardian asked him to give a top 10 list of his favorite Turkish novels. Click the above link for all of his descriptions, but here’s the list with links to purchase English translations and a few of my comments: 1. ...
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Friendly Fire
The subtitle of A. B. Yehoshua’s Friendly Fire is A Duet, but its most distinguishing characteristic is the dissonance between its two voices. In the novel’s series of brief alternating sections we are shuttled between the perspectives of a gently controlling husband, Amotz Ya’ari, an engineer; and his increasingly ...
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Douglas Rushkoff's Optimism about the Book Industry
PW‘s Soapbox pieces can be a bit hit-or-miss, but the one this week from Douglas Rushkoff (author of several books, including Life, Inc., which, along with Gaddis’s JR, should be mandatory reading for all business school students) is pretty fantastic. There’s nothing particularly new in Rushkoff’s ...
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