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
You’re the West Egg to My West Egg
Here’s an idea you can add to the list of holiday gift ideas for the writers in your life. (Assuming the writers in your life are a pair of BFFs interested in gold-plated friendship necklaces inspired by The Great Gatsby.)
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Joshua Cohen’s Epic
Joshua Cohen, author of the just-published meganovel Witz, dispenses provocations in The New York Observer: “The targets might be Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shalom Auslander… When I started this book, I wanted to sleep with their wives. By the time I finished, I wanted to sleep with their mothers.”
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Twitter Fiction
“I rather like the idea of just using a few brushstrokes to create a whole world. And, of course, with Twitter you do that, you can tell a very big story in a few lines.” Books and Arts Daily talks with Alexander McCall Smith about the new art of Twitter fiction. Pair with the full text of David Mitchell‘s Twitter story “The Right Sort,” exclusively on The Millions.
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High Praise for Rebecca Solnit
In a new issue of N1BR, Nikil Saval takes a look at Rebecca Solnit‘s latest, calling its predecessor River of Shadows “surely one of the best books of the past decade.”
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The History of Print
This week in book-related infographics: The History of Print.
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Charlie Sheen’s Poetry
It was probably inevitable that someone would turn the ravings of Charlie Sheen into found poetry. But unlike similar collections “by” Donald Rumsfeld and Rod Blagojevich, this one offers us the opportunity to compare it to the real thing – Sheen’s early ’90s chef d’oeuvre, A Peace of My Mind.
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A Little Light Weekend Reading
Need some short story recommendations to carry you through the weekend? Elliott Holt’s got 63 of them. Cheat sheet: You can read her first, second, and third recommendations free online.