Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is now out in the U.S. Also new this week are John D’Agata’s much-discussed Lifespan of a Fact, Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians, Ellen Ullman’s By Blood and The Boiling Season by Christopher Hebert, who has an essay up on our site today. The new memoir by Anthony Shadid has seen its release date pushed up to this week. See our remembrance of Shadid. Finally, it’s Christmas for baseball fans: the 2012 Baseball Prospectus is out.
Tuesday New Release Day: Edugyan, D’Agata, Manguso, Ullman, Herbert, Shadid, Baseball
Library Buys Poet’s 40000 Emails
The British Library has paid £32,000 for poet Wendy Cope‘s email archive. A far cry from stacks of personal letters, but seemingly the natural progression of things. According to Cope herself, many of the emails “are not interesting at all”. (via @BookBench)
Mad, Bad, and Healthy to Know
“It was spring. Byron was leaving England forever, a cloud of infamy hanging over him. (He is one of the few people you can write something like that about and have it be true; that is part of why he’s so satisfying.)” Via The Awl: the adventures of John Polidori, literary vampire and doctor to Lord Byron.
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Sainthood Etc.
Need something to complement our profile of Jami Attenberg’s Saint Mazie today? Then try this on for size: Year in Reading alum Emily Gould conducts an interview with the author at The Rumpus. Among other things, they talk about historical fiction, writing quickly and doing research on the Lower East Side.
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Who Wrote What?
Do you want to work at The Strand in New York City? Think you have what it takes? Take this famous quiz and match each work with its author to see if you have the literary chops to pick up a paycheck from one of the United States’s most beloved bookstores.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sayles, Mieville, Theroux, Habila, Drabble, Donoghue, Cronin
The huge, McSweeney’s-published, John Sayles novel A Moment in the Sun has been getting great reviews. It’s now out. Also new this week is China Mieville’s Embassytown, reviewed here today; Paul Theroux’s exploration of the genre of travel writing, The Tao of Travel; prizewinning Nigerian author Helon Habila’s new novel Oil on Water; and A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, the complete stories of Margaret Drabble, recently written up by Joyce Carol Oates in the New Yorker. New in paperback are a pair of Millions Hall of Famers, Emma Donoghue’s Room and Justin Cronin’s The Passage.
A Separatist Syllabus
How do readers recover from an abominable weekend but with a reading list, in this case one suggested on Twitter by Jay Varner, a writer and instructor based in Charlottesville. Varner links out to 12 articles about “why so many continue to believe an unequivocally false historical narrative surrounding the Confederacy,” including pieces by New Orleans’ mayor Mitch Landrieu, Slate‘s Jamelle Bouie, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose Between the World and Me made our roundup from last year of the best political fiction (yes, we do realize it’s decidedly not fiction).
This Is Awesome
“We’ve often thought First Nations and indigenous students — if they don’t see themselves reflected.. how engaged they can be with the educational system?” The Huffington Post reports that a school board in southern Ontario is making a native-focused literature course mandatory after learning that those books “were more interesting and engaging to students than the classics.” The class curriculum includes As Long as the River Flows by James Bartleman, Green Grass, Running Water and Medicine River by Thomas King, the 7 Generations graphic novel series by David Alexander Robertson, and Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese. (Story via Book Riot.)
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Obama on ‘Redeployment’
Recommended recommendations: President Obama recommends Year in Reading alum and National Book Award Winner Phil Klay‘s Redeployment.
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