Sometimes, reading book blogs can make you feel like you’re watching the paparazzi photograph J-Lo on entertainment television, only J-Lo has gotten ugly, become a man, died, and named herself J.R.R. Tolkien. The Rumpus Book Blog Roundup’s goal is to sift through all that and find blog posts that amuse and inform. We then share our findings with you, our readers. What we found this time below the fold.
The New Yorker’s Book Bench has an interview with Daniel Alarcon about the future of Latin American literature: “For years we’ve seen bookstore shelves lined with warmed-over copies of (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), formulaic representations of a continent that doesn’t exist anymore. If Americans are still picturing Macondo when they think of Latin America, they will misunderstand a great deal of what is happening now.”
Jacket Copy has a list of their favorite words in the OED, scoured from Ammon Shea’s new book about the legendary dictionary. Lant, for example, is “to add urine to ale, in order to make it stronger.”
On BookNinja, Canadian authors talk about sex! Well, at least they talk about writing about sex. And they seem to have some pretty good advice. Says Claudia Dey: “Sex, like fantasy, asks for negative space; a slender portion can convey the whole.”
<HTMLGIANT> reprints some wise words from Virginia Woolf about why we read.
And the blogs also want to remind you that literature is in big, big trouble: Maud Newton publishes an open letter from a NYC librarian and GalleyCat reminds us that university and private presses are teetering on the edge.
