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.
Tuesday New Release Day: Baxter, McElroy, McSweeney’s, Carey
Writing Writing
When you want to distinguish fiction and poetry writing from academic work or journalism, you use a straightforward term: creative writing. But what if that term is not the one you should use? At Slate, an article on the subject by Cydney Alexis, originally published by Inside Higher Ed.
●
●
What’s Frightening About Gone Girl
Don’t Cry author Mary Gaitskill reviews Gillian Flynn’s wildly successful thriller, Gone Girl, for the pages of Bookforum. What she finds is that the book isn’t really frightening because of its plot per se, but rather because its two main characters “do not resemble actual people so much as grotesquely smiling masks driven by forces of extreme artifice, and it’s exactly that extreme artificial quality that’s frightening to the point of sickening.” For what it’s worth, Edan Lepucki, Michael Bourne, Ed Park, Janet Potter, and Jennifer duBois each named Flynn’s book in their most recent Year in Reading pieces.
●
●
Cary Fukunaga to Direct WWII Flick
An unpublished novel by ESPN the Magazine editor Paul Kix will be adapted into a movie by True Detective director Cary Fukunaga. The project is known as Noble Assassin, and it will concern a French aristocrat who trains with British Special Operations in hopes of one day returning to his native country to lead the World War II resistance.
●
●
Mrs. Dalloway’s Privacy
Joshua Rothman writes for The New Yorker about Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, privacy and "a gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open."
●
●
Human Complications
"Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, / And the green freedom of a cockatoo / Upon a rug mingle to dissipate / The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. / She dreams a little, and she feels the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe, / As a calm darkens among water-lights." Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning" is the perfect poem to kick off the day of rest. Here's a a brief profile from The New Yorker on Stevens' life and art.
●
●
Poetry of Brotherhood
Recommended Reading: The Missouri Review's new poem of the week, Kai Carlson-Wee's “Jesse James Days,” which also won its 2013 Editors' Prize. "If I carried your name to the skateparks and railroad temples of rust, would you come to me, brother."