New on shelves this week is John Banville’s The Infinities. Also just out is Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields. (See our early look at the book, our two–part interview with Shields, and Shields’ Year in Reading.)
New Release Tuesday
Harper Lee Sues Museum
The Guardian reports that Harper Lee is suing the local museum in her Alabama hometown. The octogenarian author of To Kill a Mockingbird, who currently resides in an assisted-living facility, claims that the museum is profiting off her fame without providing her due compensation.
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Agent Scully, Author
“There is so much low self-esteem in girls, and so much self-hate that I keep reading about. My first idea for a book was something that would help to lift girls out of that place of negativity.” Actor Gillian Anderson and journalist Jennifer Nadel are writing a 300-plus page guide entitled We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere, slated for release in March 2017.
A Chinese Finnegan
“May God give me the courage to finish it:” The London Review of Books profiles one woman’s attempt to translate Finnegans Wake into Mandarin Chinese.
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Google Books: Embargo Breaker
At The Washington Post, Craig Fehrman points out that FSG inadvertently broke its own embargo on Jimmy Carter’s White House Diary when a preview of the book showed up on Google Books.
No Moral Order
Recommended Reading: On James Sallis, criminally under-read American crime writer and contemporary paranoid, whose novels we should definitely be talking about.
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Family Language
Our own Bruna Dantas Lobato reflects on her position living between languages. “I learned English out of necessity and that comes with its own problems—aesthetic and political ones. With childhood in one language and a writing life in the other, I’m standing both inside and outside my mother tongue and my stepmother tongue.” Pair with a piece on the important role of translators in literature.
“The Most Popular Books of All Time”
This week in book-related infographics: Electric Literature breaks down “The Most Popular Books of All Time.”
The New RIP
Is death “in” as a topic? It may seem like a ridiculous idea, but Lorraine Berry has evidence to back it up. She argues, using Benjamin Johncock’s The Last Pilot, among others, as proof, that mourning and grief are enjoying a bit of a renaissance.
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