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
The Personal Dilemma of Writing
Tim Parks investigates the idea of “writing to death” in the cases of Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Anton Chekhov, Charles Dickens and William Faulkner. “So many of the writers I have looked at seem permanently torn between irreconcilable positions,” Parks writes. “Eventually, the dilemma driving the work either leads to death, or is neutralized in a way that prolongs life but dulls the writing” (Bonus: Our own Mark O’Connell just reviewed Parks’s latest book, Italian Ways.)
Sunshine Journalism
California seems to have it all: Hollywood, the sun, vineyards, and more. Yet it doesn’t have a weekly magazine. California Sunday will change that by launching a magazine delivered on digital platforms daily and in local print newspapers every Sunday. Bonus: They’re hiring.
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I Do Not Like My Tinder Date
I didn’t know I wanted a Dr. Seuss-style poem about Tinder until McSweeney’s kindly provided it. You could also consider Horton Hears a Who! as political theater.
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The 2013 Bad Sex Awards
It’s not Christmas, but it’s close. It’s time for the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex Award Shortlist to be released. This year’s finalists include My Education author Susan Choi and famous folk singer Woody Guthrie among others, and the winner(?) will be announced on December 3rd. (Bonus: Their Twitter account is sharing particularly awful excerpts as well.)
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Depp on Thompson
With the imminent release of The Rum Diary, Johnny Depp shares some personal memories of the late Hunter S. Thompson.
Bad Yet Vital
As you may have heard from our own Bill Morris, The Canyons, the new movie starring James Deen and Lindsey Lohan, is a bad film that somehow manages to be worth watching anyway. At the LARB, Naomi Fry agrees with this assessment, arguing that the film is important because it “identifies how desperately many of us still want to believe that the larger-than-life, commodified good life is still available to us.”
Rebecca Solnit on the Value of Nonlinear Narratives
Solnit's work mirrors the workings of a living, breathing ecosystem, and calling it an essay collection shows a "failure to recognize internal cohesion."
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