What do Talking Heads, The Smiths, Judas Priest, and Blondie have in common? They’re all featured in the playlist Picador made to accompany the paperback release of Jeffrey Eugenides’s latest novel, The Marriage Plot. The Spotify list is chock full of songs “Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell might have been listening to in the early 1980s.” You can read Eugenides’s take on the book’s genesis over here, too.
The Marriage Playlist
The Night Circus
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Auspicious Beginnings
Please welcome the newest Millions reader: Amos O'Driscoll Hallberg, born Saturday morning. Congrats Garth!
I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
What's a Wordsworth scholar to do when nature offers him no epiphanies?
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Tuesday New Release Day: Auster, King, Judt, Bush
New this week: Paul Auster's latest, Sunset Park; a new collection of short stories from Stephen King called Full Dark, No Stars; The Memory Hole, a memoir by the historian Tony Judt who recently died from ALS (the essays collected here appeared in recent months in the New York Review of Books); and the latest obligatory obfuscatory presidential memoir Decision Points.
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Goodbye to Naples
Recommended Reading: Year in Reading alumna Elissa Schappell interviews Elena Ferrante about feminism, friendship, and her latest Neapolitan novel. Pair with Cora Currier’s essay on reading Italy through Ferrante’s books.
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The Scream
Edvard Munch's The Scream recently garnered a record breaking $119.9 million at Sotheby’s in New York. Despite the "tasty narrative potential" of the iconic artwork, the Pulitizer Prize winning art critic Holland Cotter thinks that the painting's new owner spent their vast sum of money unwisely.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Smiley; Wallace; Manzini; Meloy; Gizzi; Eliot; Knausgaard
Out this week: Ember Days by our own Nick Ripatrazone, Early Warning by Jane Smiley; Madam President by The View co-host Nicolle Wallace; Black Run by Antonio Manzini; Devotion by Maile Meloy; Collected Poems by Michael Gizzi; Volume 5 of The Letters of T.S. Eliot; and Book 4 of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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A Very Special Bunny
"Welcome to the resistance, bunny." Currently sold out on Amazon after topping the book charts for days, The New Yorker writes about John Oliver's charming children's book, A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo. Pair with: an essay about reconnecting with childhood favorites as a parent.