A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan drops today. Our review. Also out recently are Walks With Men, a novella by Ann Beattie, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a novel from Aimee Bender. This week also sees the long-awaited posthumous publication of Henry Roth’s An American Type. Another recent posthumous publication: Robert Walser’s mysterious Microscripts.
Tuesday New Release Day
Carrots: Lies and Truth
When I was young, my mother always told me I should eat my carrots so my vision would improve. For twenty four years, I’ve obeyed. But now it seems I’ve been living a lie all this time. (Bonus carrot link: the most common type used to be purple, but orange was normalized to please the Dutch monarchy.)
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A Reader’s Rebellion
“Trusting the literary press and the mechanisms of the market to curate the books we read and study is to hand over whole regions of literary curiosity and judgment before one even picks up a book.” On refusing to read. We’re not prepared to go quite that far, instead preferring our own Sonya Chung‘s practice of not finishing books.
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Short Stories for Sale
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Not Enough
“Oh, speaking of dust, I am pretty sure I have a dust allergy. A debilitating, truly severe dust allergy. But I can’t dust this place, because I have to leave everything as it was that fateful day, untouched, preserved, still, because I am crazy and should be on disability. Also, between us, you see this place? It has like 30 rooms. I mean, who can clean that?” Miss Havisham (of Great Expectations) has issues with the denial of her disability claim.
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Rough Starts
We’ve talked about great opening lines before, but what about the rough starts? The American Scholar has listed the “Ten Worst Opening Lines” and believe it or not, they’re well worth reading.
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Happy Birthday, Joseph Heller
“The morning after the opening sentence took shape, Heller “arrived at work”—at the Merrill Anderson Company—“with my pastry and container of coffee and a mind brimming with ideas, and immediately in longhand put down on a pad the first chapter of an intended novel.” The handwritten manuscript totaled about 20 pages. He titled it Catch-18. The year was 1953.” Happy Birthday Joseph Heller, author of the anti-war classic Catch-22, born this day in 1923 in Coney Island, New York.