"I read the way one might stroll. … I feel myself to be a sacred trespasser…"
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
2018 promises to be a stellar year for readers. We can't wait to get our hands on novels by Michael Ondaatje, Julian Barnes and Amy Bloom. There's a novel set in Tangier that brings to mind the fascinating lives of Paul and Jane Bowles; the true story of a woman's obsession with a serial killer; an Israeli pitted against his Palestinian best friends; posthumous works by Denis Johnson and William Trevor; and essay collections by some of the most astute public intellectuals, including Zadie Smith, Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson.
Our list of 52 titles coming out in the first six months of the year promises hours of provoking, moving, challenging and pleasurable reads. Keep this list handy so you don't get behind!
“Rebecca Solnit taught me to walk. Not in the literal sense, obviously. But it was because of Solnit that I made walking a central part of my life.” —Nick Gadd
This installment of Bibliophoria features novelist and essayist Nick Gadd (of Melbourne Circle) on Rebecca Solnit’s wonderful books about walking and how they've altered his path.
Earlier this year, Peter Cooley became Louisiana’s newest poet laureate. The Detroit native who calls New Orleans home has, over the past decades, become a beloved figure in the fabric of Louisiana literature. In this installment of On Air, Peter Cooley reads his post-Katrina poems from Night Bus to the Afterlife.
We were thrilled to share a few minutes with Mary Norris, comma queen and longtime proofreader at The New Yorker, during her recent appearance at the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge.
“I didn’t set out to be a comma queen. The first job I ever had, the summer I was fifteen, was checking feet at a public pool in Cleveland.” —Mary Norris, Between You and Me
“There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were nor how it was changed nor with what difficulties nor what ease it could be reached. It was always worth it and we received a return for whatever we brought to it.” —Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
When faced with the unfathomable, we look to great writers to articulate how we feel and what we should do. We ask—we expect—them to carry the weight and to lighten it into something beautiful that transforms an event though a new understanding. An impossible task that writers surprise us by doing over and over and over.
In our Reclamation series, we discuss writers who deserve renewed attention. In this installment, we marvel at Spanish Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez’s aphorisms.
“To work isn’t to do a lot in a hurry or, above all, many times; it is to make unique, very well made things.” —Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist
“The sound of the ash bat making contact with the ball reaches Cotter Martin in the left-field stands, where he sits in a bony-shouldered hunch.”
—Don DeLillo, Underworld
In today’s Anatomy of a Sentence, we explore sound and its ability to connect disparate people. Alongside a memorable sentence from Underworld, we look at passages in Lolita and Madame Bovary.
"... life has so much more imagination than human beings, is never, even in the face of the most conclusive proof, predictable or definitive."
Flavia Company, The Island of Last Truth
In our latest Reading Around the World, we explore the Argentinian-born Catalan writer Flavia Company and her masterful slim novel The Island of Last Truth.
For our first bookseller interview, we visit Alice's Bookshop and its proprietor, Luke Terbutt, to discover the stories behind second-hand books, the (real) job of booksellers and what we can learn from all that marginalia.
"There is often an intimate and, necessarily, emotional connection that people have with books. Some find it very difficult to part with their own, let alone those of a dear family member."
Luke Terbutt
© Jennifer Levasseur & Kevin Rabalais. All rights reserved.
