Wednesdays, right? Well, make your Hump Day a little more productive by perusing the digitized Dead Sea Scrolls. (via)
Some Dry Reading Material
Bits
Millions reader Lisa found Booker winner Line of Beauty to be “a more intellectualized, less satirical version of Stephen Fry’s The Liar.” I’m sure Lisa won’t mind if you borrow that line at the next cocktail party.The new Gabriel Garcia Marquez book (Memories of My Melancholy Whores, they’re calling it now) continues to generate headlines. This time Gabo foils the pirates. Go Gabo!At Amazon you can watch Jon Stewart make an ISBN joke whilst hawking his book America. Just click on the link and then check out the “Amazon.com Exclusives.”Spotted on the El: Truman Capote’s “unfinished novel” Answered Prayers.
Tuesday New Release Day: Yuknavitch; Keyes; Rich; Pierpont; Hobbs; Johncock; Hall; Taseer; Waclawiak; Mitchell; Markovits; Bai; Keating; Lepucki
Out this week: The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch; The Woman Who Stole My Life by Marian Keyes; The Hand that Feeds You by A.J. Rich; Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont; Vanishing Games by Roger Hobbs; The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock; Speak by Louisa Hall; The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer; The Invaders by Karolina Waclawiak; Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell; You Don’t Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits; French Concession by Xiao Bai; The Captive Condition by Kevin P. Keating; and the paperback edition of our own Edan Lepucki’s California. For more on these and other new titles, check out our latest book preview.
“Suddenly, a pale fire sprung from his palms.”
Like Game of Thrones? Love reading stories about the Brooklyn literary scene? Well, guess what — the good-humored editors at Full Stop found a way to combine the two.
Fitzgerald Uncensored
F. Scott Fitzgerald was too provocative even for the 1920s. His short story collection Taps at Reveille was never published the way he wanted it to be. When the stories came out in The Sunday Evening Post in the 1920s and ’30s, all slang, slurs, and sexual innuendo were edited out. Now, almost a century later, we can read Fitzgerald’s original work in a new Cambridge edition.
Quiet Creature
“João Gilberto Noll frustrates attempts to foresee the plot or to craft stories as they are traditionally understood and written. The series of events that appear in them are as tenuously linked into a broader narrative as those of a dream.” An interview with Noll translator Adam Morris.
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“Comfort savagery”
“Others may prefer to will themselves into James Bond’s dinner jacket and Aston Martin DB4, but I’d rather slip into a !Kung hunter’s penis sheath and heft his hunting spear.” At The Guardian, Will Self explores his odd preference for deeply uncomfortable comfort reading.
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Oyster Pirates
This week in book-related infographics: “Unusual Jobs of Famous Writers,” from Chuck Palahniuk (diesel mechanic) to Jack London (oyster pirate).