My first contribution to NPR’s Books We Like is devoted to Karan Mahajan’s Family Planning. Most of us can’t bear to think of our parents having sex. Yet our very existence is proof that they do, or at least once did. Karan Mahajan’s entertaining first novel, Family Planning, takes this conundrum as its starting-point. Sixteen-year-old Arjun, the oldest of thirteen . . .
Dickens’ house for fallen women inspired a casebook that was probably among the papers he later burned. (Via.)
Terry Teachout, a writer, critic, and good friend, writes about a logistical problem I know well: the double lives many musicians, writers, and artists, of necessity, lead. I recently went to a nightclub to hear a musician whom I know and like. The next morning I got an e-mail from my musician friend, who asked whether I’d recognized the woman . . .
“Rhys had a brief career in prostitution and also worked as a chorus girl.” Lillian Pizzichini’s The Blue Hour, a life of writer Jean Rhys, is out 4/29.
In the current New Yorker, Ian McEwan reveals that he sheltered Rushdie after the fatwa was issued. (Online for subscribers only.)