New this week are William Boyd’s Waiting for Sunrise and Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here. Readers can also now get their hands on the second two volumes in the racy, headline-making Fifty Shades trilogy.
Tuesday New Release Day: Boyd, Swift, Fifty Shades
NYRB’s Spring Reading
Daylight savings time = more daylight to read by, and as luck would have it New York Review Books is having their winter sale, so you have no excuse to be out of reading material. You can stock up on titles 50% off through the end of March / the beginning of actual Spring.
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Body Works
Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel includes, among other discomfiting things, a series of fake advertisements for surreal women’s beauty products. The plot, which follows a proofreader named A, begins with the main character’s attempt to evade her roommate, and eventually brings A to join a “Church of Conjoined Eaters.” At Slate, Molly Fischer argues the book deftly captures our society’s weird treatment of femininity.
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Twelve Angry Women
“And this is a story about what women can do to each other—why women are cruel to each other, why women don’t reach down and help each other.” In conversation for Vanity Fair, Megan Abbott and Gillian Flynn talk about female rage, #MeToo, and Sharp Objects, the HBO series based on Flynn’s novel. Pair with: Millions staffers Janet Potter and Edan Lepucki talk about Flynn and her novels.
War and Sociology
What can we learn about Leo Tolstoy by reading the German sociologist Max Weber? Let Jeremy Klemin from 3:AM Magazine explain. While we’re on Tolstoy, here’s a complementary piece that asks the age old question–who’s better: Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky?
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Fusion of the Popular
Here is Amitav Ghosh in conversation with Michael Berkeley for the BBC Radio3 broadcast about his new novel, Flood of Fire. In the interview, Ghosh talks about his childhood by the water and the influence of the sea on his work. He also curates a playlist of influential music that ranges from Bengali boat songs to Phillip Glass to ‘Hindoo airs.’
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Two From The Atavist
The Atavist has been killing it lately. Last month, I was riveted by Joshuah Bearman’s outrageous (and completely true) story of one Brit’s attempt to bring a “Baghdad Country Club” to the city’s Green Zone. This month, “Mother, Stranger,” Cris Beam’s account of her abusive mother–a distant relative of William Faulkner–had me on the verge of tears.
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