Mark Dimunation was on the committee that selected the 88 books for the Library of Congress’s current “Books That Shaped America” exhibit. Recently he did an interview with NPR‘s Lynn Neary in which he explained how he arrived at his decisions to include such works as Goodnight Moon, The Joy Of Cooking, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The Books That Shaped America
New Octavia Butler
When Octavia Butler died in 2006, she left behind unseen short stories. Butler’s agent has discovered two unpublished stories in the author’s papers. “A Necessary Being” features a lonely alien leader, and “Childminder” is about mentoring telepaths. The two stories will be published this summer in the collection Unexpected Stories.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Marcus, Gass, O’Nan, Cole
New this week are The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus, a collection of William H. Gass’s writings, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts, and Stewart O’Nan’s The Odds: A Love Story. New in paperback is Teju Cole’s Open City.
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Blooms of Darkness wins the Independent Prize for Foreign Fiction
Aharon Appelfeld, a prolific Israeli novelist, has won the Independent Prize for international fiction for his latest book, Blooms of Darkness. Check out our guide to this year’s award’s shortlist.
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Duck You Autocorrect
James Gleick talks to one of the software engineers behind autocorrect, that “impish god” responsible for turning our ids to I’ds and moviestars to Natalie Portmanteaus. In response, Jen Doll wonders whether we love to hate autocorrect “because when it messes up we’re happily reminded that phones and computers are not actually smarter than people.”
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A Shape-Shifting Body
Over at The New Yorker, Hilton Als writes about Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Prince, Cecil Taylor, Octavia Butler, and time travel. He writes, “Toward the end of the film, [Beyoncé] moves further back into the past and examines her roots, we see any number of sharply dressed women sitting in the natural world, talking among themselves. This will remind readers of that extraordinary scene in Beloved, when the elder commands those who have gathered in a clearing to love their hands, themselves—because if they don’t, who will?”
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See Spot Run
Is there any animal more noble than your beloved childhood pet? In this moving essay from 3:AM Magazine, Adrian Nathan West explains a couple of lessons that he learned about love and devotion from his Labrador named Jake.
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Their selections are generally toward the positive and progressive. If they were being really honest, they should include such stuff as Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman and The Turner Diaries.