Tag Archives: Monday’s Margins

Newsflash: The future is boring, says Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story.“Comedies end in marriage, tragedies in death. Otherwise they aren’t so different,” says the protagonist of Siri Hustvedt‘s “exuberant” new novel, The Summer Without Men.Only posting two stories is kinda lame, we admit. We’ll work on blogging better in the future.

It’s been almost a year. We’re happy to be back.A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan just won The Morning News 2011 Tournament of Books, edging Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.HTMLGIANT asks: Is David Foster Wallace the American Roberto Bolano?This Saturday, April 9th is Dzanc Day, aka National Workshop Day.On Identity Theory: we posted a [...]

Ed. note: Blake Butler has been reviewing stories from Brian Evenson’s forthcoming story collection Fugue State (Coffee House Press, July) at his website. He agreed to let us share two of them with you here. This review is for the story “Dread.” ‘Dread’ – the fifth story in the collection – is immediately different than [...]

Ed. note: Blake Butler has been reviewing stories from Brian Evenson’s forthcoming story collection Fugue State (Coffee House Press, July) at his website. He agreed to let us share two of them with you here. This review is for the story “Invisible Box.”  Another story will be reviewed next Monday.At four pages, this is the [...]

… There’s an iPhone app on the way for Bookmooch.… The Fictionaut blog has started a “Rediscovered Reading” series. First up: Father Must by Rick Rofihe.… Real or hoax, I love it (and would love to see it copied everywhere): high school student opens his own lending library, of banned books, in his locker. Nice!

Better later in the day than never…Jeanette Winterson writing about Italo Calvino makes me very, very happy. Two of my all-time favorite authors.There’s a new journal of literature and culture called THE CRITICAL FLAME. (Via Conversational Reading).I want to read Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens after hearing his recent interview on NPR. Here I thought [...]

Short Story Month is in full effect. Wyatt Mason is closing up shop at Sentences and moving on to other matters. Look through the archives for lots of good material.In other countries, when the manuscripts of a treasured author are transported to a permanent archive, it is done under a veil of secrecy. Here, eh, [...]

The Onion’s AV Club has started an online book discussion group. Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love is the first book up for chatting.A new online lit magazine, Wag’s Revue, has a Brian Evenson story for your enjoyment. Evenson (The Open Curtain) has two new books right now: the detective/noir/gothic/psychotic Last Days and the short story collection [...]

Random House has announced their largest first print run in the history of the company for–you guessed it–Dan Brown’s next book, set to be released on September 15th of this year. The new book is called “The Lost Symbol” and the narrative is set over the course of twelve hours. In honor of Shakespeare’s birthday [...]

People at Amazon.com must be wishing for a lot of things this morning, not least of which would be an established presence on Twitter, which was swamped over the weekend with discussion of Amazon de-listing the sales figures for books that in some way involve gay and lesbian issues. The online retail giant’s search engine [...]

…Over at the Virginia Quarterly Review’s blog, Mandy Redig talks about book snobbery. “Despite its world-wide popularity and the fact that Stephenie Meyer’s debut novel has sold 17 million copies, I just can’t help my tendency to, well, smirk.”…A.O. Scott talks about one of my favorite literary forms, the short-story, over at The New York [...]

… Best blurb: ” The asshole Thomas Bernhard — and I say this even though I dislike speaking ill of the dead — the asshole Thomas Bernhard, it’s fairly certain to say, only wrote a single good book. This book appears only now, even though he already wrote it in 1980, and it demonstrates what [...]

…Happy Birthday to The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Booktrade: “20th March, the first day of Spring, marks the official launch day of the 40th anniversary of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, a book which sells one copy every 30 seconds somewhere in the world, day and night. Translated into more than 45 languages, this [...]