One of Tumblr’s most consistently enjoyable accounts belongs to Ben Dewey, comic book artist and proprietor of The Tragedy Series. This past week, Mr. Dewey gave two interviews about his work.
The Tragedy Interviews
Tuesday New Release Day: Smiley; Wallace; Manzini; Meloy; Gizzi; Eliot; Knausgaard
Out this week: Ember Days by our own Nick Ripatrazone, Early Warning by Jane Smiley; Madam President by The View co-host Nicolle Wallace; Black Run by Antonio Manzini; Devotion by Maile Meloy; Collected Poems by Michael Gizzi; Volume 5 of The Letters of T.S. Eliot; and Book 4 of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Shock and Auden
A lost journal of W. H. Auden, one of three that the poet is known to have kept, has recently been discovered.
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Why Words Matter
“The hijacking of public language, as is happening now, is a way to shift perception—to bend and control thought—and must be resisted.” Summer Brennan pens a powerful first entry for her twice-monthly column about language and power at The Literary Hub. Read also our own Lydia Kiesling, who tells us, “I have to believe that literature can be a weapon of a sort — it explodes comfort even while it delivers comfort; it reveals hypocrisy in a way that the mere presentation of facts often cannot.”
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Looking Over the Shoulders of Giants
Ever want to watch someone write a novel? Nows your chance. Sorta. Silvia Hartmann, UK author of thriller novels, is inviting readers to observe as she types up her next novel in a Google doc.
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“Writing isn’t entirely mental.”
“Writing isn’t entirely mental. You’re a physical being, and sometimes when your writing is broken, it’s your body that needs attention, not your mind.” Rebecca Makkai has some tips for breaking writer’s block and a very cool perspective on writing as a whole person. Pair with our interview with Makkai about her latest novel, The Hundred-Year House.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Future, Foer, Food, Info, Boxing, Pym, Patterson, and More
My book, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books is out today (more on that here), and also out this week is Joshua Foer’s (the latest of the Foer’s to throw his hat in the authorial ring) Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, buzzed about food memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, a new look at the modern world’s most ubiquitous commodity James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, Library of America boxing anthology At The Fights: American Writers on Boxing, Mat Johnson’s Poe-inspired Pym, and Victoria Patterson’s This Vacant Paradise. New in Paperback: Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask and Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered.