New this week is The Tiger’s Wife, the hotly anticipated debut of Téa Obreht, the youngest of the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 from last year. Also new in the fiction aisle is Carol Edgarian’s Three Stages of Amazement. David Brooks’s latest pop sociology effort The Social Animal is now out — this one, excerpted in the New Yorker — sets itself apart from similar tomes by illustrating its findings through a pair of fictional characters. Now out in paperback are National Book Award winner Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon, Ian McEwan’s Solar, and Rebecca Skloot’s non-fiction blockbuster The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Tuesday New Release Day: Obreht, Edgarian, Brooks, Gordon, McEwan, Skloot
Jason Epstein on Charlie Rose
Jason Epstein, editor of literary and culinary greats (Norman Mailer, Alice Waters), co-founder of the NYRB, and life-long food lover talks with Charlie Rose about his latest book, Eating: A Memoir, and the past and future of book publishing.
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If Shakespeare Was a Programmer
“While it’s easy to dismiss coding as rote exercise—a matter of following rules—it’s worth remembering that natural language is subject to rules of its own: grammar, syntax, spelling. The best writers test these rules, bend them, or break them outright, and in doing so they keep the language alive…. With that in mind, I wanted to apply the quirks and transgressions of the great authors to JavaScript, to see where that pushed the language.” Angus Croll imagines Shakespeare as a programmer in a piece for Quartz and in his book, If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript.
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J. K. Rowling Updates
J. K. Rowling has confirmed that her new film, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, will be a trilogy. She’s also writing about Native American wizards on Pottermore, which, as our own Elizabeth Minkel has pointed out, has been controversial. It’s a good time to revisit our piece on J.K. Rowling’s second thoughts.
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TED is Dead
It’s fashionable to hate on TED all of a sudden. In the span of a month, we’ve got this piece by Nathan Jurgenson in The New Inquiry, this one by Benjamin Wallace in New York Magazine, and this one by Megan Garber in The Atlantic.
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Really Old Lake, Even Older Forest
Which discovery is cooler? Russian scientists unearthing a 20-million-year-old lake beneath Antarctica, or Chinese scientists unearthing a 300-million-year-old forest beneath a coal mine?
Also out in paperback today: the Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. And tomorrow, Next by James Hynes