The Millions

Hot on the heels of The New Yorker, The Paris Review is excerpting Calvino’s letters. In Monday’s entry, POSTERITY IS STUPID, the author writes the following: “Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious and at the slightest flattery I immediately start to strut like a turkey.”

ICYMI: Brad Listi interviewed Benjamin Percy as part of his Other People Podcast. Among other things, they talked about Percy’s new novel.

Chances are you’ve heard that in a recent interview, Claire Messud responded to a patronizing question about one of her characters — “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?” — by giving her interviewer a smackdown that resonated across the blogosphere. At Page-Turner, several authors (including Rivka Galchen, Jonathan Franzen and Year in Reading alumna Margaret Atwood) offer their own takes on the matter of “likeability.” (There’s also this piece by our own Emily St. John Mandel to consider.)

The reach of literary Brooklyn grows ever larger, as local hub BookCourt mounts a $300,000 campaign to convert the “Bibliobarn,” 160 miles north in the Catskills, into a “bookshop, event space, and writers’ retreat.” Upstaters, lock up your house-cured salume and artisinally sharpened pencils!

Alcohol. Promiscuity. LSD. All three are said to inspire creative minds. And if Sarah Dunant’s well-researched new novel, Blood and Beauty, is credible, we can add a new one, syphilis, to the list. (Wait, what?)

New this week: And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini; The Redeemer, a new Harry Hole novel from Jo Nesbø (see our interview); and Abigail Tarttelin’s debut novel Golden Boy. Also out: The Fall of Arthur, J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic poem, and George Packer’s The Unwinding. Bonus Links: You can now subscribe to listings of literary new releases in your feed reader with this RSS feed. Plus, check out more new release RSS feeds here.

Lindsay King-Miller — she of Ask A Queer Chick — pays tribute to an old friend who died before her twenty-sixth birthday.

Recommended: Andrew O’Hehir on a failed adaptation of Dune.

“Mr. Fogg assured us he would touch down at our place at precisely 8:45 in the evening. Imagine our delight when he not only arrived with all the punctuality befitting an Englishman, but also quite literally touched down! In a hot air balloon!” Introducing literary couchsurfing.

Before his death of natural causes in 2008, Henry Gustave Molaison had the world’s most famous brain. At 27, Molaison permanently lost the ability to form new memories, which led to him spending the rest of his life in “thirty-second loops of awareness.” In the LRB, Mike Jay reviews a new book on Molaison, Permanent Present Tense.

The Longreads team has teamed up with Syracuse assistant professor Aileen Gallagher in order to “search for and share outstanding student work.” If you’ve read (or written) something fantastic this past school year, they encourage you to tag it #college #longreads on Twitter or Tumblr.

Ireland debuted a new stamp featuring a 224-word short story written by Dublin teenager Eoin Moore.