Sure, the various TV recaps, screencaps, and Paris Review fan fiction will be a help, but let’s be honest, how long will those last? You could get through all of it today, in a binge. What you need, my friend, is a good book to sate that Mad Men craving you’ll be having now that it’s off the air again. Well, here’s a list of 10 great ones. That should do it. Oh, yes.
It’s not such a Mad Mad world afterall.
The New VC
In Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour, a series of short stories take the reader from the present day to 2025, exploring a near-future Vancouver in which things grow steadily more surreal. As Emily Oppenheimer writes, it’s clearly a work of speculative fiction, yet the setting resembles our own world in uncanny ways. Sample quote: “Compton achieves the more troubling, yet ultimately more satisfying, goal of portraying the fantastical as something that is very much rooted in what we think we already know about ourselves and our world.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Shafrir; VanderMeer; Tanizaki; Cameron; Strout
Out this week: Startup by Doree Shafrir; Borne by Jeff VanderMeer; The Maids by Junichiro Tanizaki; The Last Neanderthal by our own Claire Cameron; and Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ Turns 50
Fifty years after the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness, Charlie Jane Anders reflects on the "guidebook to a place I desperately wanted to visit but never knew how to reach."
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Not Exactly a Science
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova reads an essay in Biographia Literaria, a book by Samuel Coleridge now available for free in the Kindle store.
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POC Destroy Fantasy
Heads up! Fantasy Magazine is looking for submissions for their special issue, “People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy.” Per the guidelines: “We’re looking for original, unpublished fantasy stories of up to 7500 words written by People of Colo(u)r. The stories can be set in this world with fantastical elements or they can take place in another world entirely. Please avoid timeworn cliches like the White Savior, the Magical Negro, and the Woman Who Is Only A Sex Object.”
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Little Black Book of Fiction
Good news for people who like good things: The Missouri Review has unveiled a Little Black Book of Fiction app. The 99¢ app is a collection of 11 stories from the likes of William Gay (a Post-40 Bloomer), Robert Olen Butler and Nanci Kincaid – and each story comes with its own audio introduction, author information, and opening photograph.