Obama inclined readers looking for a swifter read than The Bridge should pick up the pithy new anthology of poems composed during President Obama’s first hundred days in office, Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days.
The Latest in Obama Lit
Catherine Havisham. Earlier.
I could explain to you who Catherine was, or I could let you watch Picador’s book trailer for Ronald Frame’s Havisham and let you find out for yourself. The latter seems like much more fun.
Books Have Ruined Our Lives, Now We Want to Ruin Yours
Our intrepid AWP #LitBeat correspondent attended an offsite event called “Books Have Ruined Our Lives, Now We Want to Ruin Yours“
“The Percy Jackson Problem”
“Riordan’s books prompt an uneasy interrogation of the premise underlying the ‘so long as they’re reading’ side of the debate—at least among those of us who want to share Neil Gaiman’s optimistic view that all reading is good reading, and yet find ourselves by disposition closer to the Tim Parks end of the spectrum, worried that those books on our children’s shelves that offer easy gratification are crowding out the different pleasures that may be offered by less grabby volumes.” In an essay for The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead considers questions about what children should be reading through the lens of the Percy Jackson series.
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On the Reading That Drags On and On
Everyone’s been there: the bookstore event at which the reader drones on and on. The Observer shares some reading horror stories (and a few successes). Sarah McNally of NYC’s McNally Jackson bookstore says, “The traditional reading format is broken.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Gay; LaValle; Beattie; Everett; Jaswal; Hamilton; Cole
Out this week: Hunger by Roxane Gay; The Changeling by Victor LaValle; The Accomplished Guest by Ann Beattie; So Much Blue by Percival Everett; Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal; The City Always Wins by Omar Robert Hamilton; and Blind Spot by Teju Cole. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Beyond the Pale
Nowadays, Lord of the Flies is a byword for savagery, a book that illustrates more potently than any other just how low it’s possible for humanity to sink. In The Guardian, Robert McCrum ties the book’s conception to the second World War, arguing that its view of the world was “unimaginable” without Nazi Europe.
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The Twelfth What?
Who knew? Here’s a handy infographic from Electric Literature that highlights seventeen films you probably didn’t know were based off of books.
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