Friday's Literary Grab Bag

Friday’s news has the spark of hard work and the flame of applause. Japanese writer Haruki Murakami finally releases his new novel, Iggy Pop likens literature to hard drugs, and Garcia Marquez gets his biographical due; there’s an excellent essay in The Elegant Variation about editing Fitzerald’s Gatsby, and finally, a new burner on the stove lights up as Reif Larson’s debut novel is praised in the Boston Globe. Enjoy!

– “Literature’s like coke and music’s like heroin! Literature sharpens the mind, music stupidifies,” laughs punk legend Iggy Pop, whose new album is inspired by a French novel about “death and sex”. Released this week, this latest offering from the long-haired, blue-eyed 62-year-old godfather of punk not only takes its inspiration from Michel Houellebecq’s novel “The Possibility of an Island” but also carries a French title, “Preliminaires” (Preliminaries) — Iggy Pop in AFP

– Five years of pent-up anticipation found release in bookstores across Japan this morning with the publication of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, 1Q84. Murakami, whom many consider one of the greatest living novelists, had refused to reveal the plot of the two-volume work after criticism that leaked details about his 2002 bestseller, Kafka on the Shore, spoiled its novelty value — Haruki Murakami in the Guardian

– In a January 2006 interview with a Barcelona newspaper, Gabriel García Márquez, whose memory had begun to fail, deflected a question about his past. “You will have to ask my official biographer, Gerald Martin, about that sort of thing,” he said, “only I think he’s waiting for something to happen to me before he finishes.” — Gabriel García Márquez in the NYTimes

– The premise of “The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet” is lovely, too: T.S. is a 12-year-old cartographer-artist, a prodigy who lives on a Montana farm. But in other ways he’s just a boy with a preoccupied scientist mother; a distant, cowboy father; an adolescent sister, Gracie; and a younger brother, Layton, who recently shot himself to death in the barn during one of T.S.’s experiments — Reif Larsen in the Boston Globe

– The micro-edits of Gatsby were a solitary endeavor. Fitzgerald was a prose techie who could not merely polish but power up a weak passage, raise the ram of a slow sentence. Take this early one: “The part of his life he told me about began when he was sixteen, when the popular songs of those days began to assume for him a melancholy and romantic beauty.” This sentence may seem all right, but I dare any reader to argue its elegance or gravity — F. Scott Fitzerald in The Elegant Variation

Rare, Brief Footage of F. Scott Fitzerald