Laura Miller at Salon reports on the ongoing problems with Google Books’ plan to “digitally scan every book in the world.”
The Trouble with Google Books
The Dungeon Master’s Workshop
Junot Diaz, author of Pulitzer-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, started his auspicious career in the most unlikely of imaginary places: crafting stories for his friends in the tabletop roleplay game Dungeons & Dragons.
An Interview with Jaimy Gordon
“I’ve spent my whole professional life swirling the eddies of the margins… What I want right now is to see my book in an airport. Then in a couple of years everyone will figure out that I’m too esoteric, and I’ll be back…” The New York Times posts a curious interview with the unconventional Jaimy Gordon, winner of this year’s National Book Award.
Good Clean Fun
Nick Offerman is a jack of all trades—since leaving Parks and Recreation, he has performed in a stage production of A Confederacy of Dunces, and now he’s about to publish his third book, Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Workshop. He sat down for an interview with Etsy this week.
Tuesday New Release Day: Rosenblatt; Brussolo; Wood; Castillo; Greenwell
Out this week: Thomas Murphy by Roger Rosenblatt; The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome by Serge Brussolo; Weathering by Lucy Wood; Remains by Jesús Castillo; and What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell (which we reviewed). For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Baxter, McElroy, McSweeney’s, Carey
New out this week is Gryphon, Charles Baxter’s new collection of stories. Joseph McElroy also has a new collection of stories out, Night Soul. The latest McSweeney’s (featuring that fragment from an abandoned novel by Michael Chabon) is now available, and new in paperback is Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America. Many more new books to look forward to, of course, in our massive preview published last week.
Brief Encounters with Sayrafiezadeh
Hot on the heels of our own review of Brief Encounters with the Enemy, Full-Stop publishes an interview with Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. What makes it especially interesting, however, is that their interviewer is Scott Cheshire, who also wrote our review.