New this week is David Bezmozgis’s The Free World, the new Geoff Dyer collection of criticism Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (reviewed here today), “Professor X’s” higher ed expose In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, Funeral for a Dog, a German novel in translation by young author Thomas Pletzinger, which John Wray has blurbed as “ballsy,” and Chinaberry, a posthumously published novel by the Appalachian author James Still.
Tuesday New Release Day: Bezmozgis, Dyer, Professor X, Pletzinger, Still
“How I Read”
“We all read from different places, different backgrounds, and my meeting with Proust or Woolf, or Lydia Davis or J. M. Coetzee, will not be yours, nor should it be. On the other hand I do believe reading is an active skill, an art even, certainly not a question of passive absorption. … [so] there must be techniques and tools that everyone can use or try, even if we use them differently.” Tim Parks explains how he reads for The New York Review of Books.
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Jack Ryan is Real
Jack Ryan really exists and even teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy. Vulture’s Dan Solomon met the real Jack Ryan and discussed what it’s like to have the same name as Tom Clancy’s hero. No, he has never used the connection as a pick-up line. Pair with: Our in memoriam of Clancy.
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The Publishing World of Tomorrow
“Porn, Cyberterrorism, The Russian Mob and the Future of Literature” A piece exploring the coming insurrection: digitization – and thus democratization – of books.
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Picture a Conflict
Bring Back the Illustrated Book! vs. The Illustrated Book: It Never Went Away! (Bonus: our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s novella has a cameo in the latter.)
No love for Michael Crummey’s GALORE, Max? Yes, I realize it only just came out in the States today after two years in Canada. But given its ambition (which is very much up your alley), I figured I’d bring it to your attention. The Dyer volume, however, is very good.
Ed, The book probably should have been included here. An oversight, though there is no real rhyme or reason to how these new release updates are compiled. Anyway, it’s not as though we’ve been ignoring Galore. Michael wrote a nice essay about his book, whales, and Moby Dick for us last week.