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
Harper Lee Will Publish a Sequel to “Mockingbird”
Harper announced today that To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee will publish a sequel to her famous novel this July. The sequel, titled Go Set a Watchman, was originally written before To Kill a Mockingbird, and features that book's main character Scout as a grown woman. The book is Lee's second novel, and the first she's published since the 1950s.
Mary Ruefle in Conversation
New Yorkers: don’t miss your chance to catch Madness, Rack, and Honey author Mary Ruefle in conversation with Alice Quinn. Also, be sure to read Ruefle’s essay, “I Remember, I Remember” if you haven’t yet done so.
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The Handmaid’s Tale on TV
The Handmaid’s Tale is making its series debut on Hulu with Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men) starring as Offred. Get ready for Gilead.
Walt Whitman Reads
Recommended listening: 19 Rare Recordings of Famous Authors Reading, as compiled by Mental Floss, including the likes of Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor. For a different perspective on the word "rare" as applied to digital culture, be sure to read Rex Sorgatz's recent piece for Medium, "You Need to Hear this Extremely Rare Recording."
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Roald Dahl’s Salty Advice
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Literature from the Forever Wars
"All war literature, across the centuries, bears witness to certain eternal truths: the death and chaos encountered, minute by minute; the bonds of love and loyalty among soldiers; the bad dreams and worse anxieties that afflict many of those lucky enough to return home." In an omnibus review for The New York Times Michiko Kakutani looks at the fiction and journalism being written about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including recent Year in Reading alum and National Book Award winner Phil Klay's Redeployment and Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War, "the one book that most fluently and kaleidoscopically captures both the micro and the macro of Iraq." She also wonders, and attempts to explain, "why has there been no big, symphonic Iraq or Afghanistan novel?"
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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.