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
The Real Housewives of Yoknapatawpha County
All of Faulkner's characters exist in the same county, so they probably ran into each other. What if there were a Real Housewives of Yoknapatawpha County? Nathan Pensky humorously imagines the feuds between As I Lay Dying's Addie Bundren and the protagonist of "A Rose for Emily" among others at McSweeney's.
Dispatch from Cuba
The May issue of Words Without Borders is now available online, featuring new speculative fiction from Cuba by Herson Tissert Pérez, Mylene Fernández Pintado, Ena Lucia Portela, and others.
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New Edith Wharton Discovered
A new short story by Edith Wharton has been discovered in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Yale. The nine-page story, “The Field of Honour,” takes place in 1915. We reflect on Wharton’s work.
Up There
Northern England has its own distinct genre of crime fiction, yet it’s never taken off abroad the way its counterparts in Scandinavia and Scotland have. In The Guardian, AK Nawaz wonders why this is, arguing that “there is an argument for a common and marketable 'Northernness' - if not an identity, then perhaps a literary state of mind.”
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Yes, Kate
Recommended (Revolutionary) Reading: On why Kate Millett's Sexual Politics remains so relevant to today's most heated literary arguments, despite its being nearly fifty years old at this point.
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Adonis Adapts Ancient Zuhayr Poem
Adonis, the great Syrian poet, has reproduced and adapted one of the ancient Muallaqat (The Suspended Odes) originally written by Zuhayr. The reproduction is hand-written on a scroll of paper, and then painted on, thereby “creating a new and contemporary interpretation of the text.”
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The NYRB Mantle
The question of who will take over The New York Review of Books when Robert Silvers passes the torch is a good one. Surely it's one of the most desirable jobs in all of publishing.