New in fiction this week: Benediction by Kent Haruf and Ten White Geese by past IMPAC winner Gerbrand Bakker. In non-fiction: Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss’s food industry exposé excerpted in the recent Times Magazine. From the other side of the food spectrum is Issue 6 of Lucky Peach. And it’s a big day for baseball fans: the 2013 Baseball Prospectus is here.
Tuesday New Release Day: Haruf, Bakker, Moss, Peach, Prospectus
Nicholson Baker and Friendly’s
Nicholson Baker talks about why he does so much writing at Friendly’s, a fast food chain that soon may exist only in its descriptions.
The Fifth Borough
Enlightenment comes in many guises, and though we usually think of it as arriving in a koi pond or a distant mountaintop, we can also find it, as the protagonist of Year in Reading alum Tom McCarthy’s new novel attempts to do, on Staten Island. In The New Republic, David Marcus reads the book.
Beat Ball
“Playing ‘Baseball’ With Jack Kerouac” (via) (Thanks, Derek)
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Literary Daddy Issues
Writing in The Guardian, Colm Tóibín explores the “inspiring, rivalrous, Oedipal” relationships between authors and their parents. The article’s been adapted from his forthcoming book, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families
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Something Whole
“The short story, as a form, has plenty of defenders,” the collection of unconnected short stories, maybe not so much. In an essay for LitHub, regular Millions contributor Jonathan Russell Clark praises the unlinked stories of Barbara the Slut and Other People and Single, Carefree, Mellow because “despite a lack of the wholeness of a novel, something complete and true and hard-won emerges by the end.”
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David Shields on the Colbert Report
Watch David Shields on the Colbert Report last week — Colbert: “Are you the Vanilla Ice of novels?” Shields: “Precisely.”
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This Bug’s Life
Tea with beetles, chess and lemonade with butterflies, laundry day with a praying mantis–it’s the stuff of children’s books and the dioramas of San Francisco artist Lisa Wood, now on display at The Gold Bug in Pasadena, CA.
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Quick mention that Breece D’J Pancake’s Collected Stories are now available as of today in e-reader format.