One of the biggest literary releases of the year is out today, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Read the book’s opening here. Another literary heavy hitter out today is The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst. One of Albanian writer Ismail Kadare’s masterpieces, The Palace of Dreams, is now back in print in English, and Blake Butler’s memoir Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia is now on shelves.
Tuesday New Release Day: Eugenides, Hollinghurst, Kadare, Butler
Football Book Club: Kimiko Hahn’s ‘Brain Fever’
This week, Football Book Club will be reading Brain Fever by Kimiko Hahn and posting essays about Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio — its selection from last week — and life without the NFL. Brain Fever is the 10th book of poetry from Hahn, who won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and an American Book Award in 2008 and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010.
●
●
The Peculiar Science of Hating The Beatles
At The Vulture, Nitsuh Abebe explains in seven steps how to do the impossible: convincingly hate The Beatles. It’s not easy, by the looks of it.
One Of Us, One Of Us
“But even among its peers, Louie is an outlier. It is a show that, more than any other, both caters to this new kind of audience — the Laptop Loners — and has, as its creator, a member of the club…we are living in the iGeneration, in which the self is projected back toward the world via social media. But whereas many Americans weave their public personas from curated chains of cultural signifiers — think of the popular web platform tumblr, where users ‘express themselves’ by posting digital reproductions of existing images — [Louis] C.K. aims for something more penetrating, a filmic representation of his own psyche,” claims the Los Angeles Review of Books.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: McInerney; McGinniss, Jr.; Lee; Sjón; Vapnyar
New this week: Bright, Precious Days by Jay McInerney; Carousel Court by Joe McGinniss, Jr.; How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee; Moonstone by Sjón; and Still Here by Lara Vapnyar. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
A Most Terrible State
Yesterday I told you about a ridiculously rare signed copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem famously loaded with coldness and sterility and failed human intimacy. Later this month, some new letters will be published that reveal the depth of Eliot’s mental anguish over the breakdown of his first marriage with his wife, Vivien. Eliot has long been accused (maybe fairly) of treating Vivien with intolerable cruelty and attributing to her mental state, and these letters aim to complicate that narrative.
●
●