New this week are Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt, Soul of a Whore and Purvis: Two Plays in Verse by Denis Johnson, Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays by Siri Hustvedt, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, and Team Cul de Sac, a book done in tribute to the great comic done by Richard Thompson and to raise money for research into Parkinson’s, which Thompson was diagnosed with in 2009.
Tuesday New Release Day: Vargas Llosa, Johnson, Hustvedt, Flynn, Cul de Sac
Johnson’s Spy Thriller
“The Laughing Monsters is, ultimately, about reality, myth, and outright lies. Johnson has always been interested in those moments when the thin skin of the world breaks and we are ushered, unprepared, into another realm.” Stav Sherez reviews Denis Johnson‘s The Laughing Monsters (which we listed in our Second-Half 2014 book preview) and considers the modern spy thriller for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sebald; Ugresic; Storace; Nunn; Mailer
Out this week: A Place in the Country by W.G. Sebald; Europe in Sepia by Dubravka Ugresic; The Book of Heaven by Patricia Storace; Chance by Kem Nunn; and new paperback editions of Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings and Tough Guys Don’t Dance.
Magical Atmospheres
At The Rumpus, Sean Carman interviews Year in Reading alum Laura van den Berg, whose new novel, The Isle of Youth, came out last week. (ICYMI, Nathan Huffstutter reviewed The Isle of Youth for The Millions).
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“Let us not desert one another”
In honor of Jane Austen’s recent birthday: five feminist lessons, culled from her body of work.
A Very Long Conversation
“A good marriage is, I think, a very long conversation.” National Book Award finalist Lauren Groff discusses Fates and Furies at Lit Hub. We have an interview with the author to complement it.
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Thoughts of the Enemy
In the new Granta, Adam Johnson writes about the mind-bending experience of traveling to North Korea, an experience which informed his Pulitzer-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son. Perhaps the saddest anecdote — and there are a lot of sad anecdotes — is the one about the North Korean tour guide who couldn’t believe the author didn’t want to buy knockoff goods.
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Science Fiction’s Race Problem
How can science fiction writers invent aliens and entire planets but not include multifaceted characters of color in their fiction? At The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky discusses the genre’s equality problem and analyzes how race is viewed in everything from The Left Hand of Darkness to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. “When that future unthinkingly reproduces current inequities, it seems like both a missed opportunity and a failure of imagination.”
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