Book News: Best Essays, Twitter Fiction

After a long legal battle, an Israeli court has ruled that a private collection of Kafka papers must be turned over to Israel?s national library.

?Wherever you stand on the question of whether its tirades are transgressions, whether its swoop into Holocaust imagery is a mere looting and parading of angers not the poet?s own?there is no denying its extraordinary power. It stops the breath; it bothers the heart.? Belinda McKeon on Sylvia Plath?s ?Daddy,? which just turned fifty.

Robert Atwan, founder of ?The Best American Essays? series, picks the ten best essays since 1950, including John McPhee?s ?The Search for Marvin Gardens? (subscribers only) and Jo Ann Beard?s ?The Fourth State of Matter.?

Discussing the movie adaptation of her memoir ?Just Kids,? Patti Smith said Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson pre-fame would have been good fits for the roles of herself and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Triple Canopy?s ?Corrected_Slogans,? a special issue of the magazine produced in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver?s exhibition ?Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art,? which explores the artistic possibilities of language.

?There?s DeLillo and Nabokov and Pynchon I?ll never get to because of the hours I?ve spent reading? well, I?m even afraid to tell you their names. You can and will judge. But I do it anyway because sometimes I just need the comfort of falling into something that is ready to catch me.? Michelle Dean makes a case for ?bad books.?

?The internet ate my novel, but this is much more fun #careerchange #nolookingback oh but #worldsosilentnow Hey!? The Guardian challenges twenty-one authors to write tweet-length novels.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/book-news-best-essays-twitter-fiction.html

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