Another big, literary title hits shelves today. Tom McCarthy turned heads with Remainder in 2007. Now he’s back with C. Posthumously published is Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey. Also newly released is Sara Gruen’s tale of bonobos and reality television: Ape House, William Gibson’s latest Zero History, and The Widower’s Tale by Julia Glass. Culture mavens will be intrigued by The Official Preppy Handbook reboot True Prep. And this week’s intriguing art book is Full Bleed: New York City Skateboard Photography. And in non-fiction, Bob Dylan In America by Sean Wilentz and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, so compellingly written up in last week’s New Yorker.
Tuesday New Release Day
The Mind Reels
Alcohol. Promiscuity. LSD. All three are said to inspire creative minds. And if Sarah Dunant’s well-researched new novel, Blood and Beauty, is credible, we can add a new one, syphilis, to the list. (Wait, what?)
#DiverseCanLit
We’ve been following the raging debate about diversity in the publishing industry, which recently re-triggered when BookExpo America released a speaker list of “29 white people and a cat” (as The Toast summed it up). The panel was rebalanced, but debate around the root issue continues: recent data indicates, for example, that while the US has become more diverse in population, the number of multicultural childrens’ books has remained flat under 10 percent for two decades. Follow the continuing debate on Twitter hashtags like #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #DiverseCanLit, or look to this helpful round-up of blogs and articles at BookRiot.
Breaking Point
One of the better reasons you should read this review of the new book Breakfast with Freud is this quote, in reference to a Lucian Freud painting: “Robert Hughes compared [Francis] Bacon’s face in it to ‘a hand grenade on the point of detonation.’”
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Curiosities: Three Feet of Paper
Conversational Reading covers “Four Greek Writers That You Should (and Can) Read.”Wells Tower interviewed on The Dinner Party Download.Anne Trubek at Good Magazine recommends our site to “Post-Collegiate Literary Types”The Elegant Variation gets a new reader. Congratulations, Mark!Make of this what you will: “Popular Japanese horror writer Koji Suzuki will publish a short novel called Drop on rolls of toilet paper.”Wikipedia Find of the Week I: Criticism of Wikipedia (so meta)Wikipedia Find of the Week II: No one cares about your garage band (so snarky)”Updike’s Sunset:” Kakutani takes on two newly published Updike collections, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories and Endpoint and Other Poems.Further Reading: Consider revisiting our guest post from last week, Finding Indie Opportunity on The Kindle, where a very interesting discussion developed in the comments.
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A Boor
Recommended Reading: This primer on how to explain without mansplaining.
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Different, Quieter Passions
“It soon emerged that there is a uniquely British brand of feeling, a blend of distress and composure marked by a touching compulsion to keep up appearances in the face of interpersonal dissolution. For all its prevalence and subtlety, this mode of engagement is difficult for the uninitiated to decipher or even to discern, and I would have remained oblivious of it if not for the works of Dame Iris Murdoch, a connoisseur of British emotional life in all its baffling permutations.” On Iris Murdoch and the British brand of distress and composure.
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Jonas Take Me Somewhere We Can Be Alone
We knew she was trouble when Taylor Swift joined the cast of the Weinstein’s adaptation of The Giver. Billboard reports that Swift has signed on for an unspecified supporting role along with Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Katie Holmes, and Alexander Skarsgard. The movie will start filming in Cape Town next week.
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