Out this week: Per Petterson’s latest to hit American shores is I Curse the River of Time. Also newly released is Mona Simpson’s My Hollywood. Mary Roach has another work of quirky non-fiction out, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Young readers can now get their hands on the seventh book in the Artemis Fowl series, The Atlantis Complex. And grammar mavens have a new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style to add to their reference shelf.
Tuesday New Release Day
Assemble
“From this bleak backdrop unspools West Of Sunset, Stewart O’Nan’s sparkling and frequently delightful fictionalized take on those years. It’s a setting that’s near impossible for culture buffs to resist; for a certain subset of nerd, this is a sort of literary Avengers, collecting Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker alongside O’Nan’s delicate and sensitive portrayals of Fitzgerald and wife Zelda, to say nothing of Humphrey Bogart and a cameo by Katharine Hepburn, eating soup.”
Medieval Marginalia
"Now I've written the whole thing; for Christ's sake give me a drink." Lapham's Quarterly has collected some medieval marginalia, much of which feels very modern indeed. Pair with Sam Anderson's "A Year in Marginalia."
Whitman Illuminated
Speaking of innovative publishing, Tin House released a new edition of Whitman's "Song of Myself" illustrated by Allen Crawford on May 16th. There's a book trailer, and selected pages from the finished book can be seen here.
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Recommended Reading: Jesmyn Ward
Recommended Reading: An excerpt from Jesmyn Ward's new memoir, Men We Reaped. "This is the summer of the year 2000. This is the last summer that I will spend with my brother. This is the heart. This is. Every day, this is." Pair with: The New York Times profile of Ward.
Tuesday New Release Day: Crummey; Beauman; Yan; Wisniewski; Kapoor; Galera; Hulse; Hooper; Greenberg; Whitehouse
Out this week: Sweetland by Michael Crummey; Glow by Ned Beauman; Frog by the Nobel laureate Mo Yan; Watch Me Go by Mark Wisniewski; A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor; Blood-Drenched Beard by Daniel Galera; Black River by S.M. Hulse; Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper; My Father’s Wives by the ESPN host Mike Greenberg; and Mobile Library by David Whitehouse. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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On Social Novels
“What if, instead of simply critiquing Go Set a Watchman’s failure, we tried to analyze it? The new, older work makes more sense if we read it as an attempt to accomplish two tasks: first, to master—unsuccessfully, it turns out—the smart-magazine style that Harper Lee developed in her student journalism; and second, to write in a genre that often relied on the ironic elisions typical of ‘smart style’: the midcentury social-problem novel.” Tom Perrin on Harper Lee and the social novel. Pair with Michael Bourne's Millions review.
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