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
From Chernobyl
Recommended Reading: An excerpt from Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster at n+1. Read more about Alexievich at The Millions.
Not His Best Work
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Chocolate Tears
“I can tell you that it was his agent who thought it was a bad idea, when the book was first published, to have a black hero.” Roald Dahl‘s widow says that he intended for the eponymous hero of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to be “a little black boy.” Pair with our own Jacob Lambert‘s fond recollection of reading Dahl to his son.
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Writing Without Rain
“We don’t yet know how to make it rain. But increasingly, we may be talking about what to do when the rain doesn’t come.” Anna North writes for The New York Times about literature in the age of drought.
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A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction is becoming reality. In 2014, a few strands of the late author’s hair will travel on the first solar-powered spacecraft, which is named after his story, “Sunjammer.”
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.