“The Throwback Special” by Chris Bachelder Here are the books (and the article) mentioned in this week’s “What We’re Reading”: On this week’s podcast, Batuman talks about “The Idiot” David Bellos discusses “The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of ‘Les Misérables’” Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world and Parul Sehgal and Gregory Cowles on what people are reading. Here, fiction’s only mandate is to exploit the particular freedom afforded by the form - to coast on the charm and peculiar sensibility of our narrator, Selin, “an American teenager, the world’s least interesting and dignified kind of person.” It is a rejoinder to the pressure on literature to serve as self-help, to make us empathetic or better informed, to be useful. lopes along like a highbrow episode of “Louie,” a series of silly, surreal, confident riffs about humiliations, minor and major. “The Idiot,” a hefty, gorgeous, digressive slab of a book.
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