Charles Yu’s new collection of stories, Sorry Please Thank You, is out today, and so is Tana French’s novel Broken Harbor. Both were on our Great Second Half of 2012 Books Preview. Leigh Stein’s new book of poems, Dispatch from the Future is also in stores today, alongside Ali Smith’s There But For The in paperback.
Tuesday New Release Day: Yu, French, Stein, Smith
Tuesday New Release Day
The New Yorker has collected all the stories from its 20 under 40 series into a single, snappy volume, on sale now. Also out this week is the third volume of Edmund Morris' biography of Teddy Roosevelt and a new literary foray by comedian Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty.
●
●
Politics and Prizes
“I lost him when he became a neo-liberal.” Certain Swedish literary critics remain outraged that Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for literature despite abandoning his prior socialist political beliefs. (via Arts and Letters Daily)
●
●
Margaret Atwood and Philipp Meyer Headed to the TV Screen
Here’s a double-shot of television news: Darren Aronofsky is said to be developing Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam for HBO, and AMC has ordered an adaptation of Philipp Meyer’s The Son (which has been holding steady on our Top Ten).
On Angelou’s Legacy
Over at The Takeaway, Nikki Giovanni and Kwame Dawes reflect upon Maya Angelou’s enduring legacy, and how she affected both of them personally.
●
●
Writing Literary Twitter
"Reading Literary Twitter is to witness brief, terse glimpses into the writerly psyche, and how insecure and unsure and thin-skinned we tend to be. As writers, we want to be validated. We want to matter. The published stories and poems and essays, the books we sell, the magazines we edit: all this output, this paper expelled out to the world, the screens we invade with our narratives, it all matters to us. But does it matter to everyone else?" mensah demary writes about the good, the bad, and the slightly neurotic of being a writer on Twitter for Electric Literature.
●
●
Frog and Toad Are Friends
"Millennials are so frequently hyped as the first digital generation that people tend to forget that we were raised first and foremost with books. TV and the Internet may have shaped our identities, but so did old-fashioned, printed stories." Everybody is tired of the word "millennial," but this piece makes some great points about Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad series and how it taught children to understand and appreciate their individuality.