Some heavy hitters out this week: Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan; Dear Life, Alice Munro’s latest collection; Woes of the True Policeman by Roberto Bolaño; The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín; and Far From the Tree, Andrew Solomon’s massive follow-up to The Noonday Demon. Also out are My Ideal Bookshelf, in which figures from Judd Apatow to Jennifer Egan share about which books shaped them; Jon Meacham’s biography of Jefferson; 40 years of poems by Louise Glück; a new issue of McSweeney’s food mag Lucky Peach; debut The Heat of the Sun by David Rain, and She Loves Me Not, a new collection of stories by Ron Hansen.
Tuesday New Release Day; McEwan, Munro, Bolaño, Tóibín, Solomon, Bookshelf, Jefferson, Glück, Peach, Rain, Hansen
Too Many Books
"My scant respect for the trade to which I belong (from the most ancient of academicians to the most youthful of libelists) derives from a childhood home in which I grew used to mistreating and misusing almost all the seminal texts from the history of culture." Javier Marias on the dangers of growing up with too many books.
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The Vonnegut Review
As summer rolls around, you might way to get acquainted with The Vonnegut Review. Conceived by Wilson Taylor and Matthew Gannon, the review will function as a season-long project “dedicated toward reading and reviewing all fourteen of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels.” You can participate with the Review’s Twitter and Tumblr posts by utilizing the hashtag “#VonnegutSummer.”
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LA Times interviews Jonathan Lethem
At Jacket Copy, Carolyn Kellogg talks with Jonathan Lethem about his new novel Chronic City "I love to dwell in the space of a novel -- I don't find writing uncomfortable, it's something I really love doing. Writing a long novel, especially, it means that I'm creating this whole other set of people that I'm interested in, and this whole other world I get to go into, and I try to stay there. I try to go every day, not just to see the word count amass, which is helpful, but because then my subconscious is kind of living there."
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Fact and Fiction
"if I am going to set a novel in a real place, in a real time, I must get all the details right. I should not put a wall around Washington Square, start the Iraq War in 2005, or claim that maple trees bear acorns. This matters because it has to do with keeping faith with your readers. If you get something verifiable wrong, why should they believe you when you really are making things up?" Helen Benedict for Amazon Author Insights on finding the balance between research and imagination when writing fiction. (Full disclosure, Amazon helps us pay the bills around here!)
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J. D. Salinger’s Best Unpublished Stories
Writing for Airship Daily, Freddie Moore provides an overview of ten of her favorite unpublished J. D. Salinger stories. She also shares instructions on how to find – while being careful not to link directly toward – a “207-page trove of 22 out-of-print pieces available online.” This is for the best, considering the relationship between the Catcher in the Rye author, his unpublished works, and U.S. copyright.
Welcoming Ms. Woolf to Downton Abbey
The fourth season of Downton Abbey will have a treat sure to delight certain literary fans: a cameo from Virginia Woolf. The series will resume on US television next January, so you have plenty of time to hit the books before then.
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Did You Say Sudoku
"Tsundoku: the acquiring of reading materials followed by letting them pile up and subsequently never reading them." Do you buy books and let them languish? According to Ozy, there's a Japanese word for that. Might we encourage your tsundoku habit by encouraging you to look at this list of our favorite October releases?
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Two New Elmore Leonard Stories
Byliner has published two never-before-seen stories by the late Elmore Leonard. The first story, “The Trespassers,” follows a pair of hunters, while the second focuses on a whiskey-swilling priest who gets involved in a showdown in the Wild West. (You should also read our own Bill Morris on the qualities that made Leonard a special writer.)
I would just like to comment that I’ve been looking forward to Bolano’s Woe’s of the True Policeman for months, only to find that ZERO locally owned, independent bookstores in Brooklyn, New York have stocked the book on their shelves. If they read this blog or other literary blogs, to which it seems that they don’t, then they should be embarrassed. I’m taking my 27 dollars to Barnes and Noble. For shame.