New today are Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears and China Mieville’s Railsea. And Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is now out in a snazzy three-volume boxed-set paperback edition.
Tuesday New Release Day: Carey, Mieville, Murakami
Park Life
Coincident with the release of her new novel, Marie-Helene Bertino published an excerpt in the latest issue of Granta. It features, among other things, a character using the phrase “better-him-than-me kind of park.” You could also read Bertino's interview with Jessica Gross, which followed the publication of her debut book of short stories.
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The Sot-Weed Movie
Steven Soderbergh is interested in bringing The Sot-Weed Factor – John Barth’s “750-plus-page satire of picaresque novels” – to the big, silver or computer screen. You should start getting excited about this if you’re from Maryland, interested in literature, or tickled by the word “beshit.”
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Appearing Elsewhere
My essay on Zadie Foster Franzenides and the current state of literary aesthetics is in this weekend's New York Times Magazine.
Pricey Pads
A real estate blog has calculated the approximate value of Hogwarts, and you might be surprised to learn that it’s worth only a fraction of a real life abode in Mumbai, and only about three times more than one in Orlando.
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Reading The Power in 2017
Buzzfeed interviews Naomi Alderman author of The Power, a 2016 book receiving heightened attention this year for its timely feminist premise. "In the book, women develop the ability to electrocute people at will, and as the dynamic between the genders shifts after centuries of oppression, women (finally) begin to take control back from men." Why all the newfound attention? Alderman believes that it's due to the subject matter and it being released in the States. 'It’s only just been published in America and some American reviewers have responded to it as if it was written in response to Donald Trump, but in fact no, it was written before that. I think some of the things in the world have not changed and that is why you can mistake it for having been written yesterday.' But she adds: 'I think actually one thing that has really changed is that women are really fucking angry.'"