Word on the street is that Oprah’s new book club pick will be Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan. So, last chance to get one before the Oprah logo goes on the front. We first wrote about Akpan when he appeared in the 2005 New Yorker debut fiction issue. Say You’re One of Them was also a “Most Anticipated” book in 2008.
Oprah’s New Book Club Pick Revealed
The Leonine Vladimir Sorokin
Now online: PEN World Voices video of Keith Gessen interviewing Vladimir Sorokin, author of the just-released Ice Trilogy and Day of the Oprichnik. I was a little nonplussed by the Times‘ decision to begin its profile of Sorokin with a discussion of his hair, but really…it is quite something. Come for the mane, stay for the acerbic insights.
Remembering Ray Bradbury
A moving tribute to Ray Bradbury on The Paris Review Daily from his one time fact checker Stephen Andrew Hiltner: “Ray Bradbury, who never went to college and was entirely library educated, had what so many of the sophisticated, MFA-carrying writers today lack: passion, vitality, emotional awareness.” Also: Wired has collected a bunch of reminiscences from science fiction writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin.
Creative Walking
Expert walker and poet Jon Cotner, coauthor of Ten Walks/Two Talks, will lead a set of excursions on NYC streets during the month of June. Walkers will be given two lines to repeat to strangers, in an attempt to break down social barriers: “Anonymity dissolves. Spontaneous societies arise.”
Tuesday New Release Day: King, Munro, Vásquez
New releases this week include The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood, a limited edition of Stephen King’s illustrated poem The Dark Man and The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, which we covered as part of our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview. Now available in paperback is Alice Munro’s Dear Life.
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Fifty Shades of Regret
“Shouldn’t we all feel a little embarrassed about the fuss we made over 50 Shades of Grey?” Jessa Crispin writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books about E.L. James’ trilogy and some of the longer responses, including Hard-Core Romance, which we briefly covered a few months ago.
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Shantih, Shantih, Shantih
It’s time to clear out a little spot on that bookshelf because this one is sure to impress your literary friends. Among a few other incredible books up for sale by a London bookseller is this copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. It is one of the original 460 copies hand printed by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and it is signed by Eliot to the doctor who treated him at the clinic in Laussane where the poem was written. Good thing you’ve been saving up.
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