New this week: Tupelo Hassman’s debut Girlchild, a pair of novels — Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek — by Elizabeth Taylor (not the actress) from NYRB Classics featuring introductions by Hilary Mantel and Caleb Crain, Self-Portrait of an Other, prose poems by Cees Nooteboom, and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, a new poetry collection from D.A. Powell.
Tuesday New Release Day: Hassman, Taylor, Nooteboom, Powell
Going In
In 2012, the Portuguese writer José Luís Peixoto, on the occasion of Kim Il-Sung’s 100th birthday, went to North Korea for a fifteen-day trip. The experience led him to write a travel memoir, Inside the Secret, which you can read in serialized form online at Ninth Letter magazine. You could also read Pulitzer laureate Adam Johnson’s new Granta essay about the country.
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Remembering You
Year in Reading alumna Terry McMillan discusses “why she chooses to focus on Black women, her writing process, her latest book I Almost Forgot About You, and how Black women are treated in the publishing world” at Black Media Minute.
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The Economy of Goodwill
Recommended Reading: Against crowdfunding websites that marketize goodwill.
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Dies at 86
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who served as publisher of The New York Times and as chairman and chief executive of The New York Times Company, died yesterday at the age of 86. Over at The New Yorker, you can check out an interesting round-up of recent articles they've done about Sulzberger and his 34-year-long tenure with the paper of record.
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Vacation Links
We have returned from Los Angeles, where it was so sunny and warm, to Chicago, where it is so cloudy and cold. It actually rained briefly one of the days we were in LA, and we thought it was hilarious that everyone kept apologizing for it. If people apologized for bad weather in Chicago, nobody would have time to talk about anything else. Anyway, I've spent the day catching up on e-mails, RSS feeds, blogs and the like, and I thought I'd share the links that caught my eye.Mad Max Perkins, editor and secret-identity blogger, returned from a long hiatus to reveal the title of the novel that he had gotten so excited about editing back when he was a regular blogger. The novel is Dope by Sara Gran, and I have to admit, I'm very intrigued. In the process, Perkins revealed himself to be none other than Dan Conaway of Penguin Putnam, as Sarah at GalleyCat explains.At BookLust, a gorgeous sculpture constructed out of books.Hikikomori, Japan's epidemic of shut ins. In the New York Times.An oddly terrifying look at all the psychological engineering that goes on in reality shows: The Omarosa Experiment at The Morning News.Hilarious and informative: Outrageous firsts in television history.Jonathan Yardley's review of Michael D'Antonio's Hershey gives an interesting snapshot of the chocolate magnate's life.
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Mister Orhanium’s Wonder Emporium
Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence (named after his most recent novel of the same name) will open this week in Istanbul's Çukurcuma neighborhood. The museum consists of hundreds of objects "collected" by a fictional character in the eponymous book.
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