It’s a big week for new books. Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke is now out, as is Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks, Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by William Kennedy, Luminous Airplanes by Paul La Farge, and The Funny Man by John Warner, who recently appeared in these pages. Philip Roth’s American Trilogy is getting the Library of America treatment. (Capsule previews of all of the preceding titles are available here, incidentally). New in non-fiction is Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern and Susan Orlean’s Rin Tin Tin. And out in paperback: none other than Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.
Tuesday New Release Day: Ghosh, Banks, Kennedy, La Farge, Warner, Roth, Greenblatt, Orlean, Franzen
“Polyamory is the ambitious but campy attempt to love without loss”
If you enjoyed last week’s sneak peek at Elisa Gabbert’s forthcoming poetry collection, you’ll want to check out her collaboration with Kathleen Rooney at Nailed Magazine.
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Ellis Backs Franzen
According to Vulture, Bret Easton Ellis firmly backs Team Franzen in the forthcoming issue of The Paris Review. That issue, by the way, hits shelves next week. I know because I saw a video of it on the printing press.
The Great (Literary) Depression
“Ageists who want to fault millennials for the continual decline in literary reading are wrong to do so. Across the board, there wasn’t much considerable variation in the amount literature age groups read. Everyone is hanging out in the 39–49% range.” Is America in the midst of a literary recession? According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 2015 marked the first year in 33 cycles of research that the percentage of adults who read literature had dropped below 45% to a dismal 43%.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Franzen, Binet, Baldwin, Müller
A new collection of non-fiction by Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away: Essays, is out today. Also out is Laurent Binet’s HHhH, from which we recently published some redacted scenes. Other new releases this week include Rosecrans Baldwin’s memoir Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down and Nobel laureate Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel.
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The Great American Novelist
“And that might be the best way to understand Erdrich’s artistic project: as a celebration of beauty and a testament to the redemptive power of art — which, of course, includes storytelling.” Rumaan Alam interviews Louise Erdrich about her illustrious writing career for Buzzfeed Reader. Erdrich’s newest novel Future Home of the Living God was featured in our November Preview.
Infinite Jest Inspires Infinite Tributes
First Poor Yorick Entertainment emerged as a “visual exploration of the filmography of James O. Incandenza and the world of David Foster Wallace‘s Infinite Jest.” Then, as The New York Times reports, “Parks and Recreation” co-creator Michael Schur paired up with The Decembrists to direct a music video inspired by the book. (You can watch the video on YouTube.) Now, thanks to this Radiolab podcast (and an alley-oop from @nateharris), another one of the novel’s scenes is brought to life.
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