At the Los Angeles Review of Books blog, Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick examines how socioeconomic status drives the characters of Gillian Flynn’s books. “Whether filthy rich or debt-ridden, her characters are motivated by an original sin tied to an economic woe, particularly one that has shifted their life to or from success,” he writes. “The results? Persons so crazed by money that they kill.”
The New York Times’s Tobias Grey profiles Olga Tokarczuk, whose novel Flights won the Man Booker International Prize in May for its English translation by Jennifer Croft.
Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens attempts to welcome Sarah Jeong to the paper by explaining why he stands by his new colleague despite her tweets, which he criticizes not for their supposed racism but for “their often snarky tone, occasional meanness, and sheer number.” “The person you are drunk or stoned is not the person you are — at least not the whole person,” he writes. “Neither is the person you are the one who’s on Twitter.”
“In grade school, for some sort of school-wide assignment, I wrote a story about a girl who turned into a swan,” R.O. Kwon says about the first time she understood the powerful effects of writing. “What I remember most vividly, besides the joy of writing the story, is that the school librarian read it and after she looked a little bit afraid. There’s something about seeing the power that words can have that really stuck with me.”
Tonight Metrograph cinema will be screening Sunset Boulevard ahead of this weekend’s film book fair.