A good week for new releases: John McPhee’s new, more personal collection of essays, Silk Parachute, Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, and, of course, our own Sonya Chung’s debut Long for This World. All three of these books were on our “Most Anticipated” list for 2010. New in paperback today is Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn.
Tuesday is New Release Time
Paul Harding’s Book Notes Playlist
Enon author Paul Harding made a playlist to accompany his latest book, which was recently reviewed on our site by Joseph M. Schuster.
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“Death to the Minibar!”
Anyone who travels a lot will enjoy Dubravka Ugresic‘s essay on hotel minibars. As a matter of fact, just about anyone will enjoy this essay regardless of how often they travel.
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There Goes Ten Minutes of Your Weekend
The visual wizards of Pop Chart Lab have put together yet another mind-bogglingly thorough visual taxonomy. This time, instead of cocktails or monsters, the graphic artists have turned their attention toward “The Magnificent Map of Rap Names.”
The Sounds of New York
“Learning to really listen to it and learning to kind of embrace it, rather than running away from it, was a very useful thing to do,” says Hari Kunzru of the sounds of New York City’s streets. The sirens, horns, and arguments are the inspiration for his new “multimedia book,” Twice Upon a Time: Listening to New York. (Bonus: Kunzru has participated in our Year in Reading series two times in the past.)
Great Sentences
We’ve been writing quite a bit about our favorite books from this year, but Brooklyn Magazine is going one step further and listing 2014’s best sentences.
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The Books That Shaped America
Mark Dimunation was on the committee that selected the 88 books for the Library of Congress’s current “Books That Shaped America” exhibit. Recently he did an interview with NPR‘s Lynn Neary in which he explained how he arrived at his decisions to include such works as Goodnight Moon, The Joy Of Cooking, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
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