The book world is buzzing over next week's new Stieg Larsson novel, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Knopf has unveiled a flashy book trailer, dubbing Larrson's heroine Lisbeth Salander "a one woman vengeance machine." At Salon, Laura Miller writes that Larsson's prose is "as flat and featureless as the Scandinavian landscape," but that the underlying drama, between the flawed order of institutions and a Lisbeth-like anarchy, is "a contest that still captivates us because we all feel those warring impulses within ourselves." At Time, Lev Grossman details the battle over Larsson's legacy (he died in 2004), a "public soap opera in Sweden, with all the elements of a literary thriller: a star-crossed romance, a missing will, a house divided and a mysterious manuscript."
With the World Cup imminent, host nation South Africa will be in the spotlight; The Guardian has rounded up South African authors for a discussion of the country's current scene.
The finalists for the best and worst book trailers have been announced at MobyLives. The Moby crew waded through more than four hundred submissions; this Thursday the winners will be revealed at a gala event at The Griffin. Our favorite nominee is infamously publicity-shy author Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice trailer—in which the author appears only in voice-over—making us nostalgic for his appearance on The Simpsons, and causing daydreams about seeing Pynchon in a tux and a paper bag mask at the ceremony.
Tonight at Bluestockings Books, Kerri Walsh, editor of the Letters of Sylvia Beach, will read from the correspondence of the maven of modernism, who ran Paris's Shakespeare and Company, published Ulysses, and exchanged letters with all of the literary lights of her day.
