Page-Turner - Criticism, contention, and conversation about books that matter.

July 2012
July 31, 2012

Book News: Revamping New York’s Library, Rebranding Borders

book-news.jpg

Acknowledging that the brand has “had its day,” the new owner of Borders online is rebranding the e-book store as Bookworld.

“Epublishing is inextricably tied to the structures of social media marketing and the myth that social media functions as a way of selling products.” Ewan Morrison on why e-publishing is “another tech bubble” that’s about to burst.

Peter Jackson confirms that “The Hobbit” films will be a trilogy.

In n+1, Charles Petersen on the New York Public Library’s three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar renovation plans.

“Books often feel like restorative, reliable old friends—and although Heti’s book hadn’t forfeited its material qualities, my assurance of its fixity had been shaken.” Anna Altman on the two versions of “How Should a Person Be?”

J. K. Rowling builds her kids their own Hogwarts-style tree houses.

POSTED IN

  • PRINT
  • E-MAIL
July 30, 2012

Always Returning

teju-cole.jpg

One morning this past June, I played truant from a conference I was attending in Norwich, England, and called a taxi to take me out to the countryside. But the taxi was late, and I had to stand and wait a while. When it finally arrived, shortly after nine, there was some confusion. Was this the taxi I had hired? Was I the person the driver had been sent to pick up? Had some other passenger, not yet waiting there at the circular drive at the heart of campus, called the dispatcher? We only had each other: I was going somewhere and he was prepared to take someone somewhere. I entered the car.

It was a gray morning, and visibility was poor. The high latitude and the date—it happened to be the summer solstice—meant the sun had been up since four-thirty, but fog persisted. I told the driver where I was going, and we drove in silence for a while through mild traffic and quiet streets, until the city began to thin out in the gray. And where exactly in Framingham Earl?, the driver asked me. St. Andrew’s Church, I said, reciting what I had written down: near Poringland, just off the Yelverton Road. He knew it.

I looked out the window, watching the landscape slip by, the houses, the hedges, the fields and farms, the strange looking bales of hay bound in black plastic, the road signs with their unfamiliar East Anglian names, the heavy, threatening trucks that barrelled down the busier roads. The driver broke the silence and became talkative, flitting from one subject to another in a laconic but unceasing way, not really caring much whether I was listening or interested.

Continue Reading >>

POSTED IN

  • PRINT
  • E-MAIL
July 30, 2012

Book News: Poetry Games, Fan Fiction

book-news.jpg

Sales of “Cloud Atlas” have surged following the release of an epic five-minute trailer for the novel’s star-studded film adaptation.

“Fan fiction is inherently collaborative and by convention resolutely anti-commercial, attributes which make its role in the evolution of her work both highly unusual and ethically fraught.” Emily Eakin on how “Fifty Shades” dominated the market.

NPR has invited poets to compose original works celebrating the Olympic Games. Read and listen to them online and cast your vote for your favorite.

“We have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies.” Percy Bysshe Shelley worries about information overload—in 1821.

George Cotkin on eight areas of culture that “Moby Dick” influenced.

Colson Whitehead’s rules for writing.

POSTED IN

  • PRINT
  • E-MAIL
July 27, 2012

What We’re Reading: H. G. Wells, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “In Cold Blood” in Aurora’s Wake

what-were-reading.jpg

Notes from New Yorker staff members on their literary engagements of the week.

One of the pleasures of parenting is reading your children the young-adult classics that were too complicated for you and are, likewise, too complicated for them. Somewhere there exists an arbiter with a completely confused idea of what the pre-teen mind can digest in paper form. For the parent, an opening! Thus my son and I, side by side supine in the bed, conquered “Treasure Island” and “Robin Hood,” “The Jungle Book” and “The Hobbit,” and this week we put paid to “The Time Machine,” H. G. Wells’s classic from 1895 that sits on many a teen-ager’s shelf gathering dust and guilt.

A shame, because it feels, as they say, ripped from the day’s news. The anonymous Time Traveller, a London clubman, yanks the levers on his contraption and arrives with odd precision in the year 802,701 A.D., where he finds a world of supernal beauty. Its inhabitants are the Eloi—lithe, balletic souls who eat fruit and bask in the sun. Men are like women and all are like children. At first the T.T. believes they are the only inhabitants of our future planet, but when his machine disappears he intuits something burlier is underfoot, and discovers the Morlocks, furry subterranean dwellers who fear the light and live off of … Eloi. It turns out it is not the Eloi who have mastered the Morlocks but the Morlocks who raise the Eloi like livestock. Metaphors abound for the active-minded reader: blue state/red state, Tribeca/Jersey; home owner/roofing contractor. Wells was making a different point: intellectuals and other members of the ruling class need challenges and even violence or they become etiolated, decadent, even more useless than they were in late nineteenth-century capitalism. If you’re not hardened by Darwinian competition someone, somewhere is going to eat your lunch (or you.)

Continue Reading >>

POSTED IN

  • PRINT
  • E-MAIL
July 27, 2012

“Reading Rainbow” at the Apple Store

lavar_opt.jpg

On a recent Saturday, LeVar Burton stepped out from behind a white wall as if he were walking out of the nineties. He wore a fitted black T-shirt and shiny khaki-colored pants, with Converse high-top sneakers. He had a shaved head and a pierced ear. He scanned the audience gathered that morning at the SoHo Apple Store, for what was advertised as a storytelling event for kids, and immediately noticed that there were only about five children present. But he didn’t appear thwarted. Most in the crowd were adults who had grown up during the eighties and nineties and watched him as the host of the television show, “Reading Rainbow.” They were now ready to be read to again, twenty years later.

“It would make my day if we could warm up with a little song,” Burton began.

“Are you all up for that?”

“Yeah!”

“You remember the words?”

“Oh yeah.”

People began to sing in unison:

“Butterfly in the sky / I can go twice as high / Take a look / It’s in a book / A reading rainbow.”

Continue Reading >>

POSTED IN

  • PRINT
  • E-MAIL
July 27, 2012

Boris Akunin: Russia’s Dissident Detective Novelist

BorisAkunin.jpg

Grigory Chkhartishvili has his best ideas in the morning. When he first wakes up, the fifty-six-year-old writer—who, under the pseudonym Boris Akunin, is one of Russia’s most widely read contemporary authors—might think of a new predicament in which to ensnare his popular hero, Erast Fandorin, the dashing nineteenth-century detective who can see into people’s souls and always wins at games of chance. (Locked in a cellar by a pint-sized lord of Moscow’s criminal underworld known as “Little Misha”? Bested in a ship’s salon by a pregnant French psychopath posing as a gutbürgerlich Swiss questing for a trove of priceless Indian emeralds? Tricked by the butler out of winning the heart of Romanov princess Xenia?)

Before his first cup of coffee, Akunin might hit on a solution to one of these predicaments (An arsenal of traditional Japanese weapons hidden in the crutches of Fandorin’s impeccable beggar disguise; a very ugly grandfather clock that falls on the pregnant psychopath just as she pulls the trigger, causing her to miss, but not miscarry; alas, to the last, there is no solution. Fandorin loses the princess).

The Fandorin novels, which first appeared in 1998, have sold thirteen million copies in Russia. They’ve been adapted for television and film, and have made their author well known and wealthy. The books are delightful romps through a stylized late nineteenth century—so much fun that one readily forgives the sometimes harebrained plot twists that, following closely one on another, are part of what make them so hard to put down. One Russian magazine editor wrote that he refuses to read any more Fandorin novels, likening the experience to being hooked to a catheter: once you open a book, you have no choice but to ingest the whole thing, immediately.

Continue Reading >>

POSTED IN

  • PRINT
  • E-MAIL
July 27, 2012

Book News: Redesigned Classics, Mythological Networks

book-news.jpg

Bad news for the Pope in a new study tracing the most commonly used phrases over the past five hundred years.

“The qualities used to justify the sustained scapegoating of Batman (‘too dark, not comic-booky enough’) are mostly repercussions of the very factor that makes him interesting: his humanity.” Abhimanyu Das on violence and the evolution of Batman.

A gallery of alternative book covers.

Belinda Jack on the history of women who read.

Testing ancient myths for elements of truth by treating them like Facebook, minus the I.P.O.

“My most formative childhood experience involved Stephen King, and in particular my dread fear of his book The Shining…. I was terrified of the book itself, the physical object.” Colin Dickey on reading Stephen King.

Infinite Boston: a blog of the the real-world locations that appear in David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.”

POSTED IN

  • PRINT
  • E-MAIL
July 26, 2012

Book News: Random House TV, Booker Prize Longlist

book-news.jpg

The longlist for the 2012 Booker Prize has been announced.

Jennifer Schuessler reports on the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, a weeklong summer program that “combines the intensity of the seminar room, the nerdiness of a ‘Star Trek’ convention and the camaraderie of a summer camp where people come back year after year.”

On the Paul Holdengraber Show, Philip Gourevitch talks about James Brown, the Book of Jonah, and the Rwanda genocide.

Random House is launching a new TV division.

“Scatological words are always embarrassing to discuss. But linguists are like doctors: desensitizing makes them indifferent to many things that excite others.” Anatoly Liberman on the etymology of the verb “fart.”

Watch a 1933 film of Rudyard Kipling speaking on the “peculiar privilege” of being a writer.

POSTED IN

  • PRINT
  • E-MAIL
July 25, 2012

What Do We Mean By “Evil”?

devil_opt(1).jpg

In the hours after the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, last week, one word cut through the partisan responses to the massacre, and that word was “evil.” “Such evil is senseless, beyond reason,” President Obama said. Mitt Romney spoke of the lives “shattered in a few moments—a few moments of evil.” John Boehner described the killer’s act as “evil we cannot comprehend.”

What does it mean, in the twenty-first century, to call a person like James Holmes “evil”? In centuries past, “evil” was used to describe all manner of ills, from natural disasters to the impulse to do wrong. Today it’s used mostly to emphasize the gravity of a crime, trading on the term’s aura of religious finality. The meaning of “evil” has become increasingly unsettled even as it has narrowed, yet the word has proven to be an unshakable unit in our moral lexicon. Why does “evil” persist?

In the book “Evil in Modern Thought,” from 2002, Susan Neiman traces philosophy’s struggles with evil over several hundred years. The book is structured around two events that Neiman considers the “central poles” of the modern era, both of which threw philosophers’ understanding of evil into confusion: Lisbon and Auschwitz. In 1755, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, an earthquake destroyed Lisbon, then one of the major cities of Europe. In the era before that disaster, evil was thought to come in three varieties—natural, metaphysical, or moral—and inquiry into the concept of evil was dominated by theodicy, which is the attempt to reconcile a good and omnipotent deity with evil in the world. As Neiman shows, theodicy never really recovered from the tremors. Such vast, meaningless destruction made it much more difficult to think of natural and metaphysical calamities as acts of God. Few but religious fundamentalists would continue to use the morally inflected word “evil” to describe natural disasters.

Continue Reading >>

POSTED IN

  • PRINT
  • E-MAIL
July 25, 2012

Book News: The Real Daisy Buchanan; the Poetry of Chuck Berry

book-news.jpg

Jack Daniel’s sends the author Patrick Wensink “the most polite cease and desist ever written.”

Before there was Zelda, there was Ginevra. Jason Diamond on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first love.

Jake Adam York’s taxonomy of blurbs.

“For the first time, we’re going to begin seeing an alternative to ink on paper. It may be difficult to conceptualize the idea of digital paper, but, in fact, we believe that’s what’s going to happen.” A 1994 video introducing the idea of e-readers.

“Biographers may claim noble and spotless intentions, but for the most part they deal in gossip.” Jessa Crispin defends James Joyce’s protective relatives.

Stephen Akey on the poetry of Chuck Berry.

Batman in sans serif, Spider-Man in script: matching fonts to their superhero personalities.

POSTED IN

  • PRINT
  • E-MAIL

Subscribe to The New Yorker
Sign up for email newsletters
  • This Week: Links to articles and Web-only features in your inbox every Monday.
  • Cartoons: A weekly note from the New Yorker's cartoon editor.
  • Daily: What's new today on newyorker.com.
  • Receive all the latest fake news from The Borowitz Report.
I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its User Agreement, and Privacy Policy.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/07/
www.newyorker.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-10
161040
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5WNRBN3MMB5R5ZWNXARPF2ZE3SVCEPNK
<urn:uuid:3a6103aa-db7a-4988-9b92-cae6a60b993d>
2014-03-10T18:42:15Z
23.62.62.159
sha1:3EPVZKIJ2ITU4NIOYQ5CT73HVLRWE4XO
<urn:uuid:ad68b43f-ba8e-4c20-a0f7-861385552105>
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/07/
response
<urn:uuid:0e46b049-afc3-47eb-ba94-305e2c2137df>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-183-142-35.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-10
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for March 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf