Recommended Reading: Octopus Magazine, Issue 15. It features poetry from Jason Koo, Daniela Olszewska, and Kathryn Donohue.
Read Your Octopus
Obama’s Books
In support of “Small Business Saturday,” President Obama took his daughters shopping for books at Kramerbooks in D.C. So, which books made it to the register?
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The New Fiction of Solitude
“If we are now relentlessly connected, every marginal identity gaining collective recognition, becoming assimilated, ever more rapidly? If that is where we stand, then something like a stubbornly solitary voice may be welcome, even necessary, telling us that what it means to be human—and what may keep us human—is to feel alone in a strange room, with our seclusion the thing that defines and can save us.” On bearing witness to the spectacle of aloneness and the fiction of empathy.
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Much to Sympathize With
Recommended Reading: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nervous Breakdown self-interview. (FYI, you can read an excerpt of Nguyen’s latest book over at Bloom.)
Tuesday New Release Day: Bernhard, Martin, Dickens
Back in print is Thomas Bernhard’s memoir Gathering Evidence & My Prizes. Also new this week are a pair of spiffy box sets, George R.R. Martin’s Song Of Ice and Fire and the major works of Charles Dickens.
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Nancy Drew and the Not-So-Secret Ghostwriters
For CrimeReads, Radha Vatsal takes a look at Carolyn Keene's many identities and how, in the end, it doesn't matter who wrote the Nancy Drew books.
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New from Jess Walter
The Financial Lives of the Poets author Jess Walter has a new short story out in the Kindle Single format: “Don’t Eat Cat“.
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