Lots of anticipated books hitting shelves today. At the top of the list is Michael Lewis’s look at the recent financial calamity, The Big Short. Also new today, Chang Rae Lee’s The Surrendered, Ron Rash’s story collection Burning Bright, Lionel Shriver’s So Much for That, and James Hynes’ Next, about which we have noted some intriguing Twitter buzz. New in paperback are Victor LaValle’s The Big Machine and Dave Eggers’ The Wild Things.
A Big New Release Tuesday
Recommended Reading: Qiu Miaojin
Remember when I wrote about Bonnie Huie’s translation of Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile? Well here’s some more about Huie’s work. Over at the PEN blog, you can check out the translator’s introduction to Miaojin as well as an additional excerpt from the translation-in-progress.
●
●
The search for absurdity
How The Daily Show may have an advantage over mainstream news, by virtue of its refusual to take "View from Nowhere." Conor Friedersdorf makes the compelling case that comedy writers, with their eyes rooting out the absurd in the world, can put give the news some much needed perspective.
●
●
The Root of Suffering
Read Russia 2012
Read Russia 2012 aims to celebrate contemporary Russian literature and book culture, and they’ve scheduled a bunch of events in the NYC area to coincide with next week’s BEA. You should certainly check them out, as well as NYRB Classics’ ongoing coverage of their own Russian literature highlights. (You can get even more information over here, too.)
●
●
Connected by “And” and “And”
New books of poetry from names like Linda Gregerson and James Tate are always a cause for celebration. Over at the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson takes a look at Gregerson’s Prodigal: New and Selected Poems and Tate’s Dome of the Hidden Pavilion in one extremely thorough essay.
●
●
Icon and Author
Louis Menand, Thessaly La Force, Amelia Lester, and David Haglund have come together to discuss the influence of literary powerhouse and cultural icon Joan Didion in The New Yorker’s Out Loud Podcast. Our own Michael Bourne calls Didion America’s Truth Teller in his review of her biography.
Joyce Works for Google
"The company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed... It is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones. If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google." From The Guardian, a look at "fiction in the age of data saturation," with a healthy dose of anthropology thrown in just for fun.
●
●
Liberals! Satiricists! Call Out the Big Dogs!
Steve Almond treks deeper into familiar territory in the latest issue of The Baffler, wherein the essayist takes on “our lazy embrace of [Jon] Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert,” an undoubtedly strong “testament to our own impoverished comic standards.” Indeed, Almond notes, our satirists and comics today remain “careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously.”
One comment: