Picador’s digital marketing team put together a playful web series for Wayne Koestenbaum‘s Humiliation. John Waters has called the book “the funniest, smartest, most heartbreaking yet powerful book I’ve read in a long time.”
What do Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson, and Abu Ghraib have in common?
Illustrated Joyce
Stony Road Press has teamed up with the James Joyce Centre to release a limited edition handmade book, “reproducing the original 1914 text” of “The Dead,” and featuring really interesting hand printed illustrations by Robert Berry. Check out some examples here, here, and here.
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Sick
What drives the Year in Reading alum and Boy, Snow, Bird author Helen Oyeyemi? If we can believe her interview with The Globe and Mail, it isn’t just the enjoyment she derives from writing fiction. When asked why she wrote her new book, she said: “A few reasons, but mainly to see if I could…at this point, it’s perversity that keeps me writing.”
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Vintage Interview with Jaimy Gordon
While you’re waiting to get your hands on Lord of Misrule, the National Book Award winner by Jaimy Gordon, Gargoyle Magazine posts an interview with Gordon from 1983. (via The Paris Review).
Tuesday New Release Day: Mitchell, Hadley
It’s a quiet week for new books. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which famously became a blockbuster bestseller after being released as a paperback original, is now available in hardcover for the first time ever in the U.S., thanks to a new Modern Library Edition. Short story master Tessa Hadley has a new collection out, Married Love, (as a paperback original, coincidentally).
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Hate: Is It In You?
Meghan Daum’s written the longest and best article on “Haterade” you’ll read this month. I guarantee it.
Real People
“Here is the last and biggest piece of advice I have: If you have a story that you want to tell, but you’re afraid that someone in your life is going to feel wounded, whether that feeling is justified or not, fair or not, tell it anyway.” Emma Straub, who recently wrote about her Year in Reading, gives some advice on fictionalizing real people in an essay for Rookie.