Sleep and dust

Sleepless (Pas Dormir in the original French), a book that is – what? A memoir/interrogation/painting/song of insomnia, her own and that of others. It’s a book about where, why, how we sleep and don’t sleep; about how to find a place in the world where sleep can happen, a stable for the worn-out horse. Samantha Harvey, The Guardian 

Sleepless è edito da Fitzcarrald, mentre l'originale francese da Folio. L'autrice è Marie Darrieussec.

Owens’s own fascination with dust started as a student in 2008, when she contemplated the sisyphean task of housekeeping. (“I was neither balding nor scrofulous … where was this material come from?”) But her journey doesn’t actually begin until 2015, with a road trip through California. Owens is transfixed and outraged by the story of Los Angeles, whose growth and modern existence was only possible through the systematic and outrageous theft of water and the creation of a dust desert to the east. Oliver Franklin-Wallis, The Guardian

Dust di Jay Owens è pubblicato da Hodder & Stoughton. 

Walter Benjamin’s radio tales

No audio recordings of Walter Benjamin have survived. His voice was once described as beautiful, even melodious—just the sort of voice that would have been suitable for the new medium of radio broadcasting that spread across Germany in the 1920s. If one could pay the fee for a wireless receiver, Benjamin could be heard in the late afternoons or early evenings, often during what was called “Youth Hour.” His topics ranged widely, from a brass works outside Berlin to a fish market in Naples. In one broadcast, he lavished his attention on an antiquarian bookstore with aisles like labyrinths, whose walls were adorned with drawings of enchanted forests and castles. For others, he related “True Dog Stories” or perplexed his young listeners with brain teasers and riddles. He also wrote, and even acted in, a variety of radio plays that satirized the history of German literature or plunged into surrealist fantasy. One such play introduced a lunar creature named Labu who bore the august title “President of the Moon Committee for Earth Research.” [...]

Now transcripts of these broadcasts have been assembled and translated into English in a new volume edited by Lecia Rosenthal, whose incisive introduction assists the reader in appreciating their true significance. Peter E. Gordon,
The Nation

Flirting With Danger

In April 1920 a Baltimore heiress was arrested in Russia, accused of being a secret agent. Marguerite Harrison (1879-1967), whose wedding trousseau had numbered 40 outfits, now wore lice-infested clothes and a pair of men’s shoes. Imprisoned without trial, she would spend 10 months in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka jail, including time in solitary confinement. [...]

In “Flirting With Danger: The Mysterious Life of Marguerite Harrison, Socialite Spy,” Janet Wallach presents a compelling story that pulsates with the energy of a thriller.  Moira Hodgson, WSJ

Flirting With Danger è pubblicato da Doubleday.

Things started getting weird

Let’s start off, as most good books do, with an inciting incident. In this case, that’s the arrival of an 87,000-word manuscript, an unpublished novel, in someone’s email inbox. The title of the document is “Bad Summer People”, and the setting of the book seems familiar to the person who receives the email. Some of the character names do, too. Because of this, the document gets forwarded to someone else who may find it interesting. Who then sends it to another person. And another. Eventually, this unpublished work causes a cascade of small-town mayhem, ending up as a tabloid story with a headline that reads “Media exec’s novel about murder, sex and lies in the moneyed town of Saltaire has sent residents into a spin.”

Sounds like the plot of a good beach read, right? Well, unfortunately for the media exec in question – me – that juicy plotline happened in real life, not between the pages of a book. Emma Rosenblum, The Guardian

le avventure di un libro e una lettura per l'estate (l'ho raccomandata anche sul mio boxino per Internazionale). Anche la foto è adatta all'estate! Il giallo di Emma Rosenblum, Bad Summer People, è pubblicato da Penguin.