Gabo Finishing New Novel…
Friday, May 9th by Shane
Wrong Gabbo
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, who swore he was done writing, is ready to throw another book in our faces. Is it going to be good? Uh, I doubt that very much. His last book was tossed on the literary furnace pretty viciously, and when he descibes the new book as a “novel of love” I’m not exactly salivating. But we’ll keep you up to date on the book’s evolution and when the probably bad title is revealed, we’ll let you know.
Via Conversational Reading, I found the Believer’s shortlist for novel of last year. They’ll reveal the winners next issue, but if you didn’t see it before, please check out my brief interview with shortlister Jesse Ball
* Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball (Vintage)
* Sunless, Gerard Donovan (Overlook)
* Zeroville, Steve Erickson (Europa Editions)
* Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer)
* African Psycho, Alain Mabancko (Soft Skull)
* Remainder, Tom McCarthy (Vintage)
* The Revisionist, Miranda Mellis (Calamari)
* The Power of Flies, Lydie Salvayre (Dalkey Archive)
* The Meat and Spirit Plan, Selah Saterstrom (Coffee House Press)
* An Ordinary Spy, Joseph Weisberg (Bloomsbury)
The Guardian talks about Augie March not being that great and then starts talking about picaresque novels, one of my top ten least favorite words.
Ed takes on the Princeton University Press.
And finally, I went into reading this article (via Booksquare) about airport book covers with a lot of cynicism, but then right off the bat they mention Flowers in the Attic and I think “Yeah, I can perfectly picture that book cover in my mind. More than most books I own. Damn.” So, nice going, guys. Your tactics actually work, even if I don’t buy anything from you. The rest of the article talks about books and discuss their covers. It gets a little boring, but do any of you buy books at the airport? Do covers ever attract you in that viper den?
