Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk has a new book out in the U.S. today: The Museum of Innocence. Also new on American shelves is the Booker Prize shortlister by Simon Mawer: The Glass Room.
It’s Tuesday. It’s New Releases.
Mark Haddon Takes to the Stage
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time author Mark Haddon will see his debut effort as a playwright hit the stage next month. The Independent tries to get the scoop. “So now we have this game of chess, in which you ask me what my new play is about, and I choose not to tell you what it’s about.”
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Joyce Carol Oates Explains
Our review of A Widow’s Story took Joyce Carol Oates to task for not mentioning that she had remarried not long after the death of her husband. In the New York Review of Books, Julian Barnes recently made the same point. Responding to the Barnes review, Oates defended her choice, but diplomatically added, “In retrospect I can see that I should have added something like an appendix.”
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Raymond Carver Mad Libs
Now you can write your own Raymond Carver story! (via.)
Esterházy in Manhattan
Tonight at 8, the 92nd Street Y in New York hosts Millions favorite Péter Esterházy, author of the amazing Celestial Harmonies. András Schiff offers musical interludes. Look for an interview here in the next couple of weeks.
Weary Old Men
In an excerpt of Out of Time, a new book on “the pleasures and perils of ageing,” author Lynne Segal makes a case that many iconic male writers — among them Philip Roth, John Updike and Martin Amis — display in their works a belief that the slow loss of virility is one of the most tragic effects of growing older for men. Citing passages from Toward the End of Time and Portnoy’s Complaint, she finds evidence that these writers’ depictions of masculinity reveal “obdurate social hierarchies of gender and ageing.” (Related: Keith Meatto on advice you can glean from Philip Roth’s work.)
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Anxiety or Discipline?
Recommended Viewing: This installment of The Paris Review’s “My First Time” series, in which poet Ben Lerner remembers “working under the sign of crisis” and attempting to find a publisher for his first book, The Lichtenberg Figures. A couple of Lerner-related pieces from The Millions: a review of his newest novel, 10:04, and a Year in Reading from back in 2014.
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