Novelist Anita Shreve has died at age seventy-one. Her 1997 novel, The Weight of Water, was a bestseller, and in 1998 Oprah Winfrey chose Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife for her book club. “She wrote beautifully melodic and nuanced prose. I admired every book of hers,” her publisher, Michael Pietsch, CEO of Hachette Book Group, told the Boston Globe. “She brought a great mind to the observation of emotions.”
The Guardian has assembled an ambitious list of “fifty writers you should read now,” covering not only “fiction,” “politics,” and “memoir,” but also “science and nature.”
Quijote Talks has organized an event tonight at 6:30pm featuring novelist Lynne Tillman, who will read from her new novel Men and Apparitions, and then discuss her work with artist Adam Pendleton.
Author Kevin Killian talks about his new book Tony Greene Era, younger writers he admires (Renee Gladman, Ariel Goldberg), and his own experiences as a young writer: “I encountered Amiri Baraka and Ted Berrigan and Allen Ginsberg, Robbe-Grillet and Margaret Mead. I went to the Berg Collection at the NY Public Library, where I heard they kept the Virginia Woolf papers, and asked the redoubtable Lola L. Szladits, the chief curator, if she would bring out Virginia Woolf’s suicide note. I didn’t know that Szladits was a figure who could make grown scholars cry. I had no idea. I was 17 with brass balls, and she looked at me and then said, ‘I will do this for you,’ and brought out the letter. I copied it over in my school notebook. David Bowie was releasing Ziggy Stardust and Pin Ups and Diamond Dogs and Young Americans, and those were the chief events in my life of starting out as a writer.”
At Alternet, Jacob Bacharach grapples with the question: “Why are major newspapers and magazines hiring so many right-wing cranks?” “The editors and publishers will tell you that it is so that their overwhelmingly liberal audiences may be exposed to new ideas.... And if you are the sort of person who complains about these hires online, someone will surely pop into your Twitter mentions to remind you that the outrage machine drives lots of clicks and page views. The truth, though, is that these columnists are all hired as part of a project of desperate make-believe.”
