New this week is George R.R. Martin’s latest Song of Ice and Fire installment, A Dance with Dragons. Also hitting shelves: Donald Ray Pollock’s The Devil All the Time and Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia (Don’t miss our preview with tons more upcoming books.) Jesse Ball, whose The Curfew has just come out, also has a new collection, The Village on Horseback. Jennifer Weiner’s new book, Then Came You, is out, as is the first issue of McSweeney’s new food magazine, Lucky Peach. Out in paperback: Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector.
Tuesday New Release Day: Martin, Pollock, Spiotta, Ball, Weiner, Peach, Goodman
An Inquiring Mind
“I say peel back the immediate surface layer and let’s see what’s actually underneath, if it’s possible to find that out. As a child, of course, I grew up looking under dead logs to see if there might be a newt. Most of the time there wasn’t a newt. Sometimes there was.” Margaret Atwood talks newts and skepticism in a new interview over at Hazlitt. Atwood’s newest, The Heart Goes Last, is out now.
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Approaching Parity
“If we are looking for a single category to explain why women are better represented among best-selling authors today, the Literary/None category is our best candidate. Most best-selling books fall into this category, and its change over time closely matches the overall gender ratio, shifting from extreme bias in the 1980s to close to parity in the 2000s.” Rosie Cima has put together a beautifully thorough and thoughtful analysis of gender, best-seller lists, and publishing for The Pudding. For a more exegetical analysis, consider our own Sonya Chung‘s exploration of writing across gender lines.
The Electric Typewriter Two-fer: Tom Wolfe and Susan Orlean
The folks at The Electric Typewriter have struck again, this time offering fifteen classic reads from Tom Wolfe and twenty more from Susan Orlean.
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Saunders Story a Bite-Sized Buy
George Saunders’ short story “Fox 8,” which originally appeared in McSweeney’s 33, is available as of today as a $0.99 ebook.
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We Own the Internet
Looking to be a Content Generator for a Major Internet Website? Look no further than this piece from McSweeney’s: “We pay $15 per piece of content, whether it be a well-cited, thoroughly researched 5,000-word essay or ten captions under fair-use photos, so, y’know, more bang for your buck with the photos. Also no one reads essays, so win-win.”
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