The journal Science has published a study in which two New School psychologists argue that reading “literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction,” will improve your social skills and your emotional intelligence. According to the study, a book by Chekhov will make you more empathetic than one by Gillian Flynn. (Mary Gaitskill would probably agree.)
Yes, Morrissey’s much, much-anticipated autobiography is coming out this month. The book will be released on October 17th in the UK as a Penguin Classic—rare for a living author. Representatives say that Morrissey currently “has no contract with a publisher for the US or any other territory.”
Archipelago, the original English-language publisher of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s multivolume My Struggle, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to release a hardcover edition of the first book of My Struggle. While Archipelago plans to release the four forthcoming volumes of My Struggle in hardcover—and has already published a hardcover edition of the second volume—it only printed paperbacks of the first book. As of Sunday night, they had raised more than $15,000 towards the $20,000 goal.
Salon excerpts Emily Gould’s essay about moving to Russia from the forthcoming anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. Gould and a number of other contributors will be reading from the book this Tuesday at the PowerHouse Arena. Here’s part of the essay: “During the first half of 2009, I left Brooklyn to spend three months in Moscow. The city was cold, smelly, and uncomfortable, and despite some effortful hours spent shouting into the headset provided with the Rosetta Stone software I impulse-bought on the day I applied for my visa, I didn’t speak the language. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing there. One of my most vivid memories from that first trip is of eating tainted Uzbek veal-tongue salad and, as a result, coming the closest I’ve ever come to shitting myself in public.”
An adaptation of John Grisham’s bestselling A Time to Kill, a novel about race, murder, and justice in the deep south, is about to open on Broadway—and only days before the long-awaited sequel is released.
The San Francisco Chronicle is celebrating its hometown’s status as “one of the most vibrant literary cities in the world” with a new online literary map.