New this week: Yannick Murphy’s latest novel The Call is out this week, as is Tom Scocca’s chronicle of expat life, Beijing Welcomes You (Both are written up in our big second-half preview). Also arriving is a new novel from Helen Schulman, This Beautiful Life, and Bed, the debut effort of David Whitehouse, which has already been a (minor) prizewinner in the UK, and which the publisher compares to A Confederacy of Dunces.
Tuesday New Release Day: Murphy, Scocca, Schulman, Whitehouse
Keeping it Fresh
How does a writer keep their work fresh? What’s the goal of a successful artist? What is it like to adapt someone else’s writing for the screen? The Atlantic interviews Nick Hornby about his latest book, Funny Girl, and these are some of the questions that come up. Pair with this Millions review of Hornby’s A Long Way Down.
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Things to Clear Up
A couple months ago, Melville House published a biography of Roberto Bolaño, constructed from interviews the author gave throughout his life. At Full-Stop, Andrew Mitchell Davenport reads the biography, suggesting that the preponderance of myths about the author “makes elucidating Bolaño’s biography a moral issue.” Pair with: our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s Bolaño syllabus.
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Music for Thought
The moral conundrum that can be the white hip hop critic.
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Pictorial Gateways
What is the best approach for creating a book cover? Over at Capatult, Tanwi Nandini Islam considers the best book cover for her debut novel, Bright Lines. Also check out this comparison of U.S. and U.K. book covers.
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Passé Profanity
“Certain words have gone from being shocking to being neutered,” says Glamour editor in chief Cindi Leive, who has embraced the printing of “vulgar words” on her magazine’s cover since November of 2011. Ms. Leive is one of several women’s magazine editors who believe “magazines are catching up with other media, where women have been using explicit language for years.”
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