New books this week: Adam Johnson’s much talked-about novel The Orphan Master’s Son, Shalom Auslander’s first novel and Hope: A Tragedy.
Tuesday New Release Day: Johnson, Auslander
OWS lit down the line?
Christian Lorentzen wonders, in Book Forum, what the first OWS novels will be like. He anticipates them showing up next year, but I’m thinking we’ve already got at least two, though they were both published well before Occupy: Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story ought to fit the bill, and, of course, there’s that famous Melville story about Wall Street, but I’d prefer not to talk about it when I could just direct you to Hannah Gersen’s piece instead.
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“Go Read Alice”
The diary novel may be “an under-attended” genre, but Johannah King-Slutzky is trying to remedy that. In an essay for The Hairpin she traces the diary novel’s history from the Victorian era to Go Ask Alice while examining the genre’s balance of “melodrama and awkward moralizing” with the potential for subversion.
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You Can’t Take His Word for It
“The suit is the most recent legal move in a years-long dispute between Burton and the broadcaster that originated the series.” New York Magazine‘s Vulture blog reports that LeVar Burton is being sued by WNED-TV in Buffalo, NY over the continued use of his famous Reading Rainbow tagline, “but you don’t have to take my word for it.”
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Solitary Reader
Rebecca Solnit writes on loneliness, intimacy, and writing in The Faraway Nearby. Melissa Holbrook Pierson reviewed the book at The Millions.
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2011 Best of Plagiarism
Q. R. Markham‘s heavily plagiarized book Assassin of Secrets somehow made it onto Kirkus Reviews‘ “2011 Best of Fiction” list. (Saved here in case they take it down.) Interestingly, the link doesn’t appear to lead anywhere. (via)
Tuesday New Release Day: Ng; Kwok; Moses; Scheft; Ahmad; Fitzgerald
New this week: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng; Mambo in Chinatown by Jean Kwok; The Appetites of Girls by Pamela Moses; Shrink Thyself by the Letterman staff writer Bill Scheft; The Last Taxi Ride by A.X. Ahmad; and the Cambridge University Press edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Taps at Reveille.