In a big week for new releases, we have Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, the sequel to his blockbuster debut The Magicians; Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, reviewed here today; another new Geoff Dyer book, The Missing of the Somme; DBC Pierre’s Lights Out in Wonderland; and Kevin Wilson’s debut novel The Family Fang (which one blurber calls The Royal Tenenbaums meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). Four of the five books above, incidentally, were featured in our big second-half preview. And out in a paperback this week are a pair of award winners: Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land.
Tuesday New Release Day: Grossman, Baker, Dyer, Pierre, Wilson, Mukherjee, Grossman
Cohen’s New Old Ideas
Leonard Cohen’s new album Old Ideas is getting glowing reviews. Slate says of Cohen, “When it comes to lyrics, he’s second to no one—including Dylan.”
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La Piñata
“The only way to avenge all the things white people did to you was to get your kid into Harvard. You bided your time. You worked your ass off, day after day, year after year.” Our own Marie Myung-Ok Lee has a new short story in Joyland called “La Piñata” (and of course you can also read her in these pages, too).
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Tuesday New Release Day: Marcus, Gass, O’Nan, Cole
New this week are The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus, a collection of William H. Gass’s writings, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts, and Stewart O’Nan’s The Odds: A Love Story. New in paperback is Teju Cole’s Open City.
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Academic Playground
Columbia once moved its twenty-two miles of books by sending them down a really, really long slide. As The Paris Review documents, in 1934, the university stocked its then-new Butler Library with a slide that ran from Low Library to the new building. (No word on whether the slide is secretly used to this day.)
Shortlist Announced for the Tournament of Books
Can’t wait for this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books? The staff announced their shortlist and panel of judges this morning. The shortlist includes, among other books, Redeployment by Phil Klay, which took home this year’s National Book Award, as well as our own Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.
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Poetry Walk in the Bronx
Don’t miss Jon Cotner‘s “Poem Forest” at the NY Botanical Gardens Nov 4-5 and Nov 11-12, 12-4:30. It’s a self-guided tour that promises “a new kind of poetry experience, as well as a new kind of walking experience. Poet-walker Jon Cotner has fused lines selected from 2500 years of nature poetry with Thain Forest’s autumnal landscape.” Details at the Poetry Society of America.
Norris Church Mailer dead at 61
Norris Church Mailer, widow of Norman Mailer, died yesterday at 61 following a long battle with cancer. Mark Olshaker, president of the Norman Mailer Society, wrote: “She was the pilgrim soul who captured and won Norman’s heart and mind and who shared with him the last three decades of his life.”
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Stopping the Voices
It’s an age-old question for writers and thinkers: how do you quiet the noise of your thoughts? In Aeon Magazine, Tim Parks wonders if it’s even possible to silence internal monologues — and, if it is, whether that silence means losing sight of our identities. (Related: our own Mark O’Connell reviewed Parks’s latest book.)
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