“The permanent retainer behind Liza’s uninsured upper front teeth had endured some irremediable catastrophe, leaving her bowl of cereal unchomped for the first time in decades.” So begins “Sentimental Driftwood,” a story by Yelena Akhtiorskaya, whose first book, Panic in a Suitcase, has just been released by Riverhead. The story begins: Carla Blumenkranz recently interviewed Akhtiorskaya for Bookforum.
At the LRB, the novelist Helen DeWitt describes being stalked at her family cottage in Vermont. When her stalker is finally, after many months, arrested, the sentence he receives is minimal. He has been punished for a single incident, a break-in, and not the months of harassment DeWitt endured. The victim advocate explains that DeWitt had “weakened the case” by not seeming intimidated or fearful in her deposition. In other words, she “had failed to convince as damsel in distress.”
At Slate, Laura Miller praises Haruki Murakami’s avoidance of the “coyness and elision that plagues so much American literary fiction.”
Russia has granted Edward Snowden a three-year permit—not asylum, but a “normal residential permit”— to live in the country.
“Novel” once described a work of fiction. Now people use it to describe…just about any book.
The saga of Amazon continues. A long list of writers—including Maxine Hong Kingston, ZZ Packer, Michael Pollan, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Claire Messud, Ann Patchett, and Cheryl Strayed—scold the company in an open letter. And the New York Times looks into an alliance between Google and Barnes & Noble against their mutual rival.