With New Year’s Eve looming, LA Weekly is forgoing their usual cookbook of the week in favor of a cocktail book—The PDT Cocktail Book by Jim Meehan and illustrator Chris Gall, the only beverage book that made it into their Best of 2011 “cookbook” list.
PDT Cocktail Book
Costume Drama
Callan Wink, the Wyoming writer who’s published two stories in The New Yorker since 2011, has a new story, “One More Last Stand,” in Granta’s Spring issue. Among other things, it depicts the oddly frightening “heat of battle re-enactment.”
Making a Place Worth Living
“It is difficult for them to understand why a successful black woman would choose to return to the South and, worse yet, to Mississippi, which looms large in the public’s imagination for its racist depredations, and rightfully so.” For Time magazine’s American South issue Jesmyn Ward writes about her decision to return home to Mississippi.
Wetlands
Recommended Reading: Blake Morrison on the literature of England’s flood-prone east coast.
●
●
“praise the Hennessy, the brown / shine, the dull burn.”
Recommended Reading: “Praise Song” by Nate Marshall, one of America’s brightest young poets.
●
●
An Earthquake-Proof Library
Japanese architect Shinsuke Fujii has designed a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that's meant to withstand the shocks of an earthquake.
●
●
●
Hurricane Harvey Relief
The Texas Library Association has a disaster relief fund to support damaged libraries, and you can give to it here (via Book Riot).
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Chabon; Lamb; Walcott; Muldoon; Pushkin
New this week: Moonglow by Michael Chabon; I’ll Take You There by Wally Lamb; Morning, Paramin by Derek Walcott and Peter Doig; Selected Poems 1968-2014 by Paul Muldoon; and a new Richard Pevear translation of Alexander Pushkin’s complete prose. For more on these and other new titles, go read our latest fiction and nonfiction book previews.
●
●