Another posthumously published Roberto Bolaño novel has arrived, The Third Reich. Time to update our Bolaño Syllabus again? Also posthumously published is Michael Crichton’s Micro, which was a third finished when he died and was completed using Crichton’s notes by Richard Preston. Also new this week is Stephen Sondheim’s Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011).
Tuesday New Release Day: Bolaño, Crichton, Sondheim
Tolstoy in Russia
Last year Russians wrestled over Tolstoy much as they did when he was alive. The New York Times documents Russian statesman Sergei V. Stepashin’s difficult journey to rehabilitate Tolstoy’s reputation.
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iStephen Fry
Stephen Fry joins “the congregation at the Church of Apple” for the launch of the iPad and shares his thoughts on the company and its newest product.
Sonia Sanchez’s Essential Black Literature
Sonia Sanchez shares her picks for the essential books of Black Literature, including Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Zora Neale Hurston, and more.
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Salvador Dalí Illustrates the Western Canon
Few people know about Salvador Dalí's illustrations for famous works of the Western canon, including Don Quixote, Macbeth, Paradise Lost, and even The Bible.
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The Slow Cookers
Dwight Garner, writing in the current issue of The New York Times Magazine, laments that so many high-end American novelists seem to be working on “the nine-year plan,” delivering a new novel roughly once a decade. He cites Jeffrey Eugenides, who will be out soon with The Marriage Plot, his third novel in 18 years, along with such slow cookers as Jonathan Franzen, Donna Tartt and Michael Chabon. One name Garner neglected to mention is the Pulitzer Prize-winner William Kennedy, who will be out next month with Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, the eighth installment in his Albany cycle and his first novel since Roscoe appeared nine years and nine months ago. Look for our review of it here next month.
There Once Was an Astronaut from Nantucket
Forget learning how to fly, better practice your haiku and limerick writing skills. NASA applicants are asked to write a tweet, limerick or haiku. Is Colonel Chris Hadfield to blame?
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