3 Articles About Books to Read Right Now: Less on Peggy Guggenheim's Sex Life, More on Her Role in Modern Art

This article first appeared in The National Book Review

Links to three great new articles about books, from The Guardian, The New Criterion, and Buzzfeed

1. Kathryn Hughes, "Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern by Francine Prose - Review" (The Guardian)

In this review of novelist Francine Prose's short new biography of art collector Peggy Guggenheim, Hughes writes of a major reassessment going on. For many years, much of the talk about Guggenheim was about her wide-ranging sex life. Increasingly, she is being recognized for her extraordinary role in shaping modern art.

2. Gary Saul Morson, "The Intolerable Dream: Don Quixote at Four Hundred" (The New Criterion)

As Don Quixote turns 400, it is widely considered a "masterpiece." Morson is not entirely smitten by Cervantes's famous novel. "It shows its writer, who never wrote anything remotely comparable, constantly surprised by an idea he can barely handle," Morson writes.

3. Meghan Daum, "What It's Really Like to Be an Editorial Assistant in Publishing" (Buzzfeed) - In this excerpt from her new collection of essays, Daum recalls the dashed expectations of her generation of young literary assistants. They thought their lives would be like Mary McCarthy's and Maxwell Perkins's. The reality: genteel poverty and reading a lot of manuscripts about near death experiences.