The Atlantic's fiction issue is out now, among the many must-reads is a conversation with Paul Theroux on "Fiction in the Age of E-books."
What Cheever was to commuter country, Deborah Eisenberg is to Manhattan malaise. Her underrated short stories are a veritable taxonomy of urban dysfunction. Tonight, she reads from her new volume, Collected Stories, at Chelsea's 192 Books. Cult-celebrity spotters should scan the audience for her longtime partner, Wallace Shawn, who lately has been stealing scenes in contemporary drama's most gripping panorama of unhappy uptowners, Gossip Girl.
It is National Library Week, and the gray lady wants you to pipe down: "when did libraries become a cacophonous combination of cafe, video store, music store, computer lab, and playground?" At Lapham's Quarterly Colin Dickey muses On Bones and Libraries: "Every librarian, every book collector, finds him or herself between . . . two mythical places—the Perfect Library of God and the Infinite Library of Babel, the one transcribed by Jerome, the other by Borges;" for bookworms stuck elsewhere, here's the Huffington Post's slide show of America's Most Amazing Libraries.
Cuban blogger Yaoni Sanchez's book, Cuba Libre, was confiscated because, as the authorities wrote, "Physical inspection of the package found documents whose content goes against the general interests of the nation." Western readers can see what that means early next year, when Melville House publishes an English-language version of her work.
