Happy Friday, Asymptote pals! We’re one-and-a-half weeks past the release of our latest issue and it’s a stunner—including dazzling superstar names like Ismail Kudare, Patrick Modiano, and Valeria Luiselli, among so many others. Blog co-editor Katrine even wrote up a little feature on a personal favorite of hers (check it out here!). Or you could swing back with the five must-reads we blog team recommended at issue launch. Or you could close your eyes and click at random. You’re sure to land on a gold mine either way.
Speaking of blog content—that’s an NPR transition for you!—you may have noticed that the blog adheres to American English in its style guide. Perhaps that explains our lassitude in coinages—because Atlas Obscura has determined the primary difference between American and British English is the Yanks’ proclivity to making up words. Speaking of the United States’ innovation: Americans lost one of their greatest fictive innovators this week: E. L. Doctorow has passed away at age 84.
Can you imagine Scandinavian literature without its notoriously juicy crime fiction? Long before Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø, literary power couple Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö paved the road for what we’ve come to think of as Nordic noir. And French writer Michel Houllebecq’s latest (and perhaps most acutely controversial) novel, Submission, has finally appeared in English, in a translation by Lorin Stein—and the reviews are largely positive. Salman Rushdie’s a similarly controversial personality/writer in the public sphere: here’s what happens when he’s mocked (in a fake Twitter account titled “Rushdie Explains”).
Summer feels almost over, for the over-planner within, at least, but if you’re interested in more summer reads, Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s short story collection—written in Spanish by a Colombian about Belgium—Lovers on All Saints’ Day, is finally available in Anne McLean’s English-language translation.
Thank goodness this is typewritten—for legibility’s sake—but handwriting has its own allure, also (do you draw little hearts above your I’s and lower-case J’s?). Handwriting could bust writer’s block, for one. Just draw a little duck with a notepad. Your weekend will be more productive in no time!