http://www.themillions.com Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:52:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 1. Death is change. This is particularly true for abstract things that, by definition, can't die. So when someone of some repute pronounces the death of something abstract--of God, of art, of history, of poetry, of fiction--I'm quick to think like a serf cheering at the funeral of a king: X ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/02/long-live-fiction-a-guide-to-fiction-online.html There's something for every lover of fiction coming in 2010, but, oddly enough, the dominant theme may be posthumous publication. Roberto Bolaño's relentless march into the canon has inured us to the idea of the bestseller from beyond the grave (and of course, for as long as there have ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/most-anticipated-the-great-2010-book-preview.html Before we get too far into 2010, let’s take a look at what was keeping readers interested on The Millions in 2009. To start, we’ll divide the most popular posts on The Millions into two categories, and we’ll begin with the “evergreens,” posts that went up before 2010 but continued ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/millions-meta-data-2009.html This year’s New York Times Notable Books of the Year list is out. At 100 titles, the list is more of a catalog of the noteworthy than a distinction. Sticking with the fiction exclusively, it appears that we touched upon a few of these books as well: The Anthologist by ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/11/the-notables-2009.html The Best American Short Stories, of all the annual story anthologies, seems to have the biggest following among readers. The series has been around in one form or another since 1915 and has published short fiction by pretty much all of America's best-known (and many more lesser known) practitioners ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/11/best-american-short-stories-by-the-numbers.html If I could read just one book by Author X, which would it be? This may be the hardest question we can ask a fellow reader, insofar as it assumes that we can teleport straight to the heart of aesthetic experience, rather than journeying there over weeks or years. In ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/09/a-bolano-syllabus.html Somewhere between Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day and J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, I decided that there was a certain affinity between the Land of the Rising Sun and "this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England." A namby-pamby assertion of ineffable spiritual kinship, however, will not ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/08/big-in-japan-and-england.html At the beginning of the year, we noted that "2009 may be a great year for books." With the publishing schedule for the remainder of the year filled out, calling 2009 a great year for readers is now a certainty. If anything, 2009 is backloaded, with new titles ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/07/most-anticipated-rounding-out-2009-epic_01.html You may have noticed that the search box on Amazon recently added an "auto-complete" feature. So if you start typing in letters, it starts suggesting things that begin with those letters. It's probably safe to assume that it suggests the most frequently searched words, so, if we look ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/06/abcs-of-amazon_17.html With the awarding of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award last week, the 2008/2009 literary award season is now over, which gives us the opportunity to update our list of prizewinners. Though literary prizes are arbitrary in many ways, our prizewinners post is compiled in the same spirit that one might ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/06/prizewinners-20082009_15.html