New Bookforum Website

Late last week, Bookforum launched their new website, which has all of the great features of the previous one (the daily round up blog, articles from the print version, etc.), but has also added a couple of cool things, like a daily review section and a syllabi section containing lists of recommendations within a particular category.

I actually have a Beyond Bolano syllabus up there right now featuring Latin American/Spanish writers worth picking up post-2666.

All the syllabi are interesting: Ed Park’s on Comic Novels, Mark Sarvas’s on Literary Losers, David O’Neill’s on Emily Dickinson, Rachel Aviv on Schizophrenic Memoirs, Lisa Darms on Walking, and Devin McKinney on Supernatural Nonfiction.

I’m a sucker for these sorts of lists to begin with (especially from smart, interesting readers like the ones above), and can’t wait to see what else gets added. . .

(I’ll write more about this in a BEA round-up, but I did discover a new genre over the weekend that needs some fleshing out—“historical religious speculative fiction.” Not kidding. I can’t find the promo page at this moment, but it was a self-published title about how a Jewish woman named Esther spreads a new philosophy of life, starting a spiritual revolution that prevents the Holocaust and the ensuing nuclear war . . . which is where this book must be pretty damn daring and complicated to explain how to avoid a nuclear tragedy that never actually happened . . . Ah, BEA!)