Today arrives Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, Lacuna, “an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover.” Also out are a couple more of those nifty “Olive Editions” from HarperCollins, this time of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Update: There’s a new edition of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation too.
Some New Releases: Kingsolver, Pynchon, Plath
50 States of Literature
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Best Magazine Covers
Amazon invites you to vote for the best magazine covers of the year. (via Kottke)
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Little Prince, Lots of Translation
This month, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s iconic children’s book Le Petit Prince will be translated into Hassanya, a rural Arabic dialect spoken in portions of Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, and Mali. This marks the 300th translation of the book.
Roth v. Roth v. Roth
In April’s Atlantic, Joseph O’Neill tries to separate Philip Roth from his perpetual themes of family, Newark, and Judaism, and from his many authorial personae. The task proves unmanageable, but the attempt sheds light on the man destined to become Roth’s greatest critic: Roth himself.
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Best of Electric Lit
Here’s a look at the top-ten most read articles from Electric Literature of 2015, most of which we’ve already told you about and all of which is worth a revisit. Bonus: here’s a Best of Brain Pickings, as well.
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Ghosts of the Tsunami
People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry’s forthcoming book on the Tōhoku earthquake and its aftermath, Ghosts of the Tsunami, will be released some time in late summer/early fall, and BBC Radio put together a 30-minute teaser to tide you over until then. You can also check out Parry’s moving yet unsettling piece for the London Review of Books.
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