If you like your music country/folk-ish with a difference, Joshua James new album Build Me This might be of interest. No Depression, the roots music blog, describes the album as a hybrid of “chain-gang chants, country-fuzz rave-ups, gospel rafter-raisers, southern blues grinds, and civil war camp songs.” Try not to be taken aback by the Jared Leto-in-a-mud-mask cover art.
Joshua James
Amelia Morris on Claiming Her Writerly Territory
Amelia Morris discusses her debut novel, Wildcat, which explores contemporary motherhood and the isolation it so often brings.
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Google Map Tourism
Google Maps now allows users to take 3D photo tours of more than 15,000 popular sites around the world. Here’s Yosemite’s Half Dome, and here’s Trevi Fountain.
“I feel very honoured, even if I can’t help thinking I must be a fraud”
If Nicholas Wroe’s profile of Javier Marías doesn’t get you excited to read the Spanish novelist’s work, then maybe Hari Kunzru’s Year In Reading entry from this past year will do the trick.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Saunders, Self, Mansbach, Zambra, Hensher, Harrison, Celona, Maltman, Schrank, Ginder, McPherson, Kunzru, Rogan
One of the most exciting new books of 2013 hits shelves today: Tenth of December by George Saunders. Also out are Will Self’s Booker shortlisted Umbrella, Rage Is Back by Adam Mansbach, Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra, Scenes from Early Life by Philip Hensher, The River Swimmer: Novellas by Jim Harrison, Y by Marjorie Celona, Little Wolves by Thomas Maltman Love is a Canoe by Ben Schrank, Driver’s Education by Grant Ginder, and new from NYRB Classics is Testing the Current by William McPherson, with an introduction by D.T. Max. New in paperback are Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru and The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan. There are many more new books to explore, of course, in our huge 2013 books preview, published this week.
Sounds Dear
The Guardian posted a short story from Alice Munro’s new collection.
Langewiesche on the Chilean Miners
The Outlaw Sea author William Langewiesche has a new ebook out in the “Single” format, Finding the Devil: Darkness, Light, and the Untold Story of the Chilean Mine Disaster, about the 2010 disaster that left 33 miners trapped for nearly two months.
Joyce Carol Oates Is A Glass of Water
“I feel very transparent to myself. I’m more like an observer. I’m interested in what’s going on. I’m not sure that I really have a personality,” Joyce Carol Oates said in The New Yorker’s micro documentary about her writing life and routine. Pair with: our essay on Oates’ The Accursed.
You Call Those Facts? These Are Facts.
“Since scientific knowledge is still growing by a factor of ten every 50 years, it should not be surprising that lots of facts people learned in school and universities have been overturned and are now out of date,” writes Ronald Bailey in his review of Samuel Arbesman’s The Half-life of Facts.
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