The Tournament of Books

New this week: Summer House With Swimming Pool by Hermann Koch; I’ll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin; The Book of Unknown Americans by Year in Reading alum Cristina Henríquez;  In the Wolf’s Mouth by Adam Foulds; The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh; The Girl Who was Saturday Night by Helen O’Neill; and two new books, Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots, by Stuart Dybek.

Are you the type of reader who craves the food described in novels like our own Nick Moran? Then take The Guardian’s “Food in fiction” quiz. Sample question: “According to the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, what kind of food is eaten tomorrow, yesterday, but never today?”

Recommended Reading: From The New Yorker, it’s Tessa Hadley on fiction as anthropology: “When I’m writing a story, its world is thin, unsatisfactory, untrue, until I start to find my way to those details, those ‘small cultural signifiers.’ As these accumulate on the page, the life in the piece thickens, the details breed, and the story begins to stir.”

Following in the footsteps of Amy Poehler, The Office star B.J. Novak has signed a book deal with Knopf. Unlike Poehler, who plans to write a memoir, Novak will publish a collection of comedic short stories.

“I first met Dean not long after Tryscha and I hooked up. I had just gotten over a wicked fucking hangover that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with a six-foot-five douchebag and a beer bong… Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see hot LA actress chicks and try In N’ Out burgers, always vaguely planning and never taking off.” – From On the Bro’d, where every sentence of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is retold for Bros. (via The Rumpus)