The much discussed Fifty Shades of Grey arrives as a paperback today, though one wonders if readers will be as willing to read it if they must shed the privacy of the e-reader. Also out is the gorgeous retrospective, The Art of Daniel Clowes. The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright and MAN Asian Literary Prize winner Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin are new in paperback.
Tuesday New Release Day: Grey, Clowes, Enright, Shin
For the Cause
As the 20th century wore on, the Strugatsky brothers grew pessimistic about Soviet Communism, eventually turning their fictional worlds from socialist utopias to dystopias. Their most famous early novel, Noon: 22nd Century bears little resemblance to later works like Hard to Be a God, which implicitly criticizes the Soviet government. At The Paris Review Daily, Ezra Glinter charts their evolution.
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Tuesday New Release Day
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan drops today. Our review. Also out recently are Walks With Men, a novella by Ann Beattie, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a novel from Aimee Bender. This week also sees the long-awaited posthumous publication of Henry Roth’s An American Type. Another recent posthumous publication: Robert Walser’s mysterious Microscripts.
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“The historic past unrolls like a park”
Recommended Reading: Sadie Stein on the writing of Elizabeth Bowen.
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Prime Minister, Poet
A rare manuscript dealer has put up for auction a 10 stanza poem written (in crayon!) by Winston Churchill. The poem, entitled “Our Modern Watchwords,” is believed to be the only known poem written by the British prime minister in his adulthood.
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North Carolina Literary Festival Sets Its Lineup
The North Carolina Literary Festival just announced its lineup for the 2014 engagement, and it’s stocked with Millions favorites. Among others: Junot Díaz, Scott McClanahan, Richard Ford, Ben Fountain, and William T. Vollmann. The festival will take place in Raleigh from April 3rd through April 6th.
Irv Loathed NPR
Recommended Reading: A piece of new fiction by Joanthan Safran Foer! Go check out “Maybe It Was the Distance” over at The New Yorker. Here’s a review of Foer’s Tree of Codes by Kevin Nguyen for The Millions which calls the format of the book, “a wonderful experiment in what a book can be, and also home to a mediocre novel.”
Old Writers, New Media
Which convergence between classic author and modern technology is more off-putting: the University of Virginia’s William Faulkner recordings, or this YouTube video of Leo Tolstoy sawing wood?
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Man, I work at a B&N in a highly conservative area of Texas and we couldn’t keep that book in stock for more than a couple days before RH picked it up. Even the old ladies previously asking about Bibles and such would sheepishly come up and ask where they were kept.
It’s a freakin’ epidemic. So much for the shame of reading smut in public!