New this week: Gary Shteyngart’s much buzzed about Super Sad True Love Story, Rick Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death (another literary dystopia), and a new Roberto Bolaño collection, The Return. Bonus for GN’R fans: GN’R drummer Steven Adler’s tell-all memoir My Appetite for Destruction: Sex, and Drugs, and Guns N’ Roses.
Tuesday New Release Day
True Romance
We might mock romance readers for how much Kleenex they go through, but they’re more emotionally perceptive than others. A new study on the interpersonal sensitivity of readers found that romance readers are better at discerning facial cues and emotion than other literati. But don’t worry if you aren’t a Nicholas Sparks fan; reading any genre makes you more empathetic, as we’ve reported on before.
Who Did You Talk To
You may have read some portion of the infamous Watergate transcripts. What you probably haven’t read is quotes from the transcripts rearranged into poetry. At The Paris Review Daily, a few representative poems by Richard Nixon, including “I Can’t Recall,” “The Position” and “In the End.” You could also read our own Michael Bourne on Thomas Mallon’s book Watergate.
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Election Heat Map: Book Edition
Amazon created an “Election Heat Map” to tally the number of “red” and “blue” books sold across the nation, and the count is updated hourly. The results are somewhat surprising to those who believe liberals read more than conservatives. (Perhaps liberals frequent more independent bookstores?) At the time of this writing, “red” books are favored by a margin of 7%.
This Land Press
This Land Press, which launched in 2010 as a project to “bring literary journalism to Middle America,” will suspend publication of its magazine this spring, and there are no immediate plans for future publication.
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Not Evil
Recommended reading: Sara Polsky writes for the New Yorker about “The Detective Novel That Convinced a Generation Richard III Wasn’t Evil.”
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I would be more interested in reading the making of the Adler book, what went on between him and his ghost writer, because if there’s one thing I am absolutely sure about it’s that Adler cannot write, let alone form a coherent thought.