Don DeLillo’s first short story collection, The Angel Esmerelda, is out this week, as is Magdalena Tulli’s genre-defying In Red. New in paperback are Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies and Steve Martin’s An Object of Beauty.
Tuesday New Release Day: DeLillo, Tulli, Ozick, Martin
Auditors Welcome
Historians N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain have done us all a serious solid by assembling a syllabus of readings around “what many simply call ‘Trumpism’: personal and political gain marred by intolerance, derived from wealth, and rooted in the history of segregation, sexism, and exploitation.” The self-directed course contains readings from more than 100 scholars – including Audre Lorde, Aziz Ansari, and Ta-Nehisi Coates – and aims to “introduce observers to the past and present conditions that allowed Trump to seize electoral control of a major American political party.”
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Is She a Betty or a Veronica?
Lena Dunham is the new voice of the Archie comics generation. The Girls creator will write four issues of the famous comic, coming out in 2015. She’s not the only woman joining the comics industry. DC Comics is adding a Native American teenage girl, inspired by the real Canadian Aboriginal teen activist Shannen Koostachin, to the Justice League United.
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The Working World
The media world is abuzz about a former Harper’s Bazaar intern suing parent company Hearst for allegedly violating labor laws for not paying her (With reactions ranging from “She’ll never work in this town again.” to “Good for her. It’s about time!”). At least she didn’t get sucked into HuffPo’s aggregation turbine.
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Everyone Sucks in Some Ways
Is it worth rediscovering Mary McCarthy? All the evidence points to yes.
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Maya Angelou Has Died
Maya Angelou, poet and author of many memoirs — most famously I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — has died at 86. This video of Angelou reading her poem “And Still I Rise” may serve as a good start to a celebration of her life.
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So Happy For You
Is envy really the worst form of pettiness, as Kierkegaard suggested? Maybe. The great Roman philosopher Cicero had his own, fairly radical thoughts on envy — namely, that “compassion and envy are consistent in the same man; for whoever is uneasy at any one’s adversity is also uneasy at another’s prosperity.”
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RIP Mall Bookstores
Mourning the death of the Waldenbooks at the mall. “But in a way I’m glad, as this means that yet another supposed agent of publishing’s ever-imminent death is now biting the dust itself.”