Riffing on R&B singer Ernie K-Doe’s one-time statement, Chris Rose writes in the Oxford American, “I’m almost positive that all music, at least all American music, comes from Louisiana.” The essay appears in this year’s OA Southern Music Issue, a reliably excellent source of tunes and writing. Indeed, as Dwight Garner put it in The New York Times, the CDs that accompany each annual issue “practically belong in the Smithsonian.”
Louisiana: Where Music Was Born
Graduating from Hogwarts
J.K. Rowling will be releasing her first novel for adults on Little, Brown and Co. Details are set to come out later this year.
DWF – Dating While Feminist
Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s new book Outdated: How Dating is Ruining Your Love Life starts a public conversation about the pitfalls of Dating While Feminist (DWF).
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Presidential Fan Mail
Jacket Copy gets some presidential fan mail. Plus, find out what said president has been reading lately.
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A Home at the End of the World
“I’m not paranoid, I’m really not.” The Washington Post has a profile of the so-called American Redoubt, an area of the Pacific Northwest populated by doomsday preppers. Pair with our own Emily St. John Mandel‘s reading list of five can’t-miss apocalyptic narratives.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Egan; Eugenides; Thien; Okeowo; Solomon; St. Aubyn; Machado; Coates
Out this week: Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan; Fresh Complaint by Jeffrey Eugenides; Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien; A Moonless, Starless Sky by Alexis Okeowo; An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon; Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn; Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (whom we interviewed recently); and We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Whitehead, Jin, Gray
Colson Whitehead’s zombie thriller Zone One hits shelves today, as does Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem. Also out is The Journals of Spalding Gray.
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Tarot and Literature
It’s time to recognize tarot’s place in literature. Peter Bebergal writes on Jessa Crispin’s latest project, The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life.