By Doree Shafrir
The books that will move you, inspire you, make you cry, make you think, make you laugh. Even if you read them in high school or college, you’ll have a different perspective on them now that you’re Out In The World. (Trust me.)
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Jessica Soffer
By Jessica Soffer
Jessica Soffer’s Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots is a novel about families, food, and facing uncomfortable truths. It also culminates in a revealing and satisfying ending that brings all its pages together. For Tip Sheet, Soffer shared 10 of her favorite endings in books.
I don’t like to play favorites. It’s not right. Sometimes, it’s an act in futility. Apples and oranges and such, especially in literature. But here we are. Ten Best Book Endings, according to me, a woman who has read as much as she possibly could during her twenty-seven years and who wishes every day for more reading time so that she could say “Ten Best,” and feel more certain. Until then, “best” is a moving target—and I’m not even in possession of all the darts.
Bottom line: the most we can look for is an end that justifies, honors, makes meaningful the means. And sometimes we might hope for an end that does more: an end that outdoes the means. Sometimes, a deftly plotted twist will do the trick, or a really grand grand finale, or a thought so moving, so appropriate that we write it down and keep it in our wallets for years. When endings work they feel both inevitable and earned, which just doesn’t happen in real life where nothing is ever still long enough to really end at all. And so good endings must do more than life: honoring what’s come before, swelling with the promise of what’s to come, and hovering in exactly the right place so that when it’s over, it’s hardly over. It’s just right.
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Every now and then, PWxyz likes to let the staff around here talk about books, because that’s all we secretly want to do. Previously, the PW staff has Fixed the Modern Library 100 Novels List, named some favorite short stories, and picked the best books read in 2011 and 2012. Here, we asked: What’s the first book you read that really made you love books?
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In Partial Disgrace, a novel by the late Charles Newman more than twenty years in the writing, is being published by Dalkey Archive. Since the book concerns an imaginary Central European nation, Cannonia, we asked its editor, Ben Ryder Howe, to come up with a list of ten novels featuring mythical countries.
A good mythical country is not a place that doesn’t exist. It’s a place that does exist but you weren’t aware of it, either because you didn’t look at the map carefully, haven’t spent enough time in that particular part of the subarctic Eurasian hinterlands, or simply got confused by the exotic-sounding name. (For its part, Cannonia, the setting of In Partial Disgrace, is a country that is “effectively all border,” and usually covered on maps by the compass sign or coat-of-arms.)
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| By Joshua Farrington
A list of teachers’ favourite books compiled by the Times Educational Supplement (TES) has declared Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as number one. Harper Lee’s popular school text, To Kill a Mockingbird, came in second, while JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series came in third.
500 teachers responded to an online survey to name their favourite books, to create a list which TES editor Gerard Kelly called: “a masterpiece of erudition and entertainment” which “could be one of the few things that Michaels Gove and Rosen agree on”.
In the magazine’s leader column, he wrote: “Strip out the children’s books, the inclusion of which is only to be expected from people whose job it is to engage children, and what you are left with is a pretty canonical list. There’s enough Dickens, Steinbeck, Hardy, Wilde, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hugo and Eliot to satisfy even the most conservative of politicians, and of course, plenty of modern greats: Kerouac, Ishiguro, Roy and Plath, to please the modernists.”
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By Rob D. Young
One of the most often repeated lessons for writers is the importance of reading. As Stephen King put it, “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” However, reading alone is not enough. If you want to read in a way that trains your writer’s eye, active engagement is required. Here are some tips for maximizing your learning during the reading process.
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Mark Binelli’s Detroit City Is the Place to Be is a nuanced portrait of a once-great American industrial city’s fall into decay, and its recent, tentative renaissance. Binelli, also a novelist and contributing editor for Rolling Stone, tells us the 10 cities that have received the finest treatment in literature, and the books to read for each.
When I started thinking about my favorite cities in literature, I quickly realized I’d need to impose a minimal number of arbitrary constraints on the game or otherwise risk burying myself. And so: no to the excruciatingly obvious (Ulysses, A Moveable Feast), and no repeat cities, either (with the exception of New York, because, come on, it’s New York; henceforth this exemption shall be referred to as “the Joseph Mitchell Clause”), and my list would be divided equally between works of fiction and nonfiction.
Also, the city in question, and this particularly applies to the novels, needed to be more than mere setting. Whatever that means; it’s fairly subjective, I know. As annoying as it can be when people refer to a city as “another character” in a book, I guess that comes closest to the sense of this last criterion.
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From hashtags to LOLs to Cupertinos and Scunthorpe problems, Tom Chatfield picks the most interesting neologisms drawn from the digital world.
My book Netymology: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World is about the stories behind new words. I’ve been an etymology addict since I was a teenager, and especially love unpicking technological words.
It’s a great reminder of how messily human the stories behind even our sleekest creations are – not to mention delightful curiosities in their own right.
1. Avatars
This word for our digital incarnations has a marvellously mystical origin, beginning with the Sanskrit term avatara, describing the descent of a god from the heavens into earthly form. Arriving in English in the late 18th century, via Hindi, the term largely preserved its mystical meaning until Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash first popularised it in a technological sense.
Fusing notions of virtual world-building and incarnation, it’s the perfect emblem of computers as a portal to a new species of experience.
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Eggers and his flawless skin
By Blake Butler
Lydia Davis can’t stand the sight of children wearing bike helmets.
Richard Brautigan never crossed state lines except on foot.
Jack London loved braiding men’s hair.
Matthew Rohrer claims never to have been inside or to have seen an ad for Chili’s.
Jack Kerouac was addicted to licking stamps.
Jhumpa Lahiri has collected more than 200 autographed head shots of Al Pacino.
“’Wow, cool sky!’” was the original first sentence of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
Gertrude Stein was on the payroll of the New York Mets.
Virginia Woolf passed the bar exam in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Maine.
T. C. Boyle ghostwrote the screenplay for Mrs. Doubtfire.
Gordon Lish religiously eats at the Applebee’s in Times Square on the 13th and 18th of every month.
Michiko Kakutani‘s Gmail password is wolfdickfourteen.
Barry Hannah hated the sight of charcoal.
Gary Lutz has beaten Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! more than 400 times.
From age eight to 18, Ann Beattie earnestly believed she was born wrapped in a shower curtain.
Dave Eggers bathes in almond milk every Sunday and video-records it.
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For three consecutive decades, Granta has foreseen the brilliant careers of the British literary scene, showcasing an array of talent that included Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Rose Tremain, Alan Hollinghurst, A.L. Kennedy, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Jeanette Winterson, David Mitchell and Zadie Smith.
Here, in a collection of new work by twenty writers, is the future of literature in Britain: Granta’s fourth BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS.
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