Sam Lipsyte’s new collection The Fun Parts is out this week. Also out are Red Doc> by Anne Carson, Mary Coin by Marisa Silver, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid, Jacob’s Folly by Rebecca Miller, The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates, and The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver.
Tuesday New Release Day: Lipsyte, Carson, Silver, Hamid, Miller, Oates, Graver
Talk About a Wonder Emporium
“This Is My Home” is a short profile of a New York City collector of oddities. His home is regularly mistaken for an antique shop, but it really strikes me as the perfect sister-store to Brazenhead Books.
Tuesday New Release Day: Dunham; Mantel; Biss; Stein; Cronenberg; Zupan; Amis
Girls creator Lena Dunham’s first book is on shelves, as is the new short story collection by Man Booker laureate and recent Millions interviewee Hilary Mantel. Also out: On Immunity by Eula Biss; A Sudden Light by Garth Stein; Consumed by the filmmaker David Cronenberg; The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan; and The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis. For more on these and other titles, check out our Great 2014 Book Preview.
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The Literate Frontman
Some of Jeff Tweedy‘s favorite writers: “I like Henry Miller a lot. I like William H. Gass a lot. Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Kurt Vonnegut. . . . I used to walk into bookstores when I was a kid and get the stuff that looked the craziest and the most free.” (In a Rolling Stone interview, unavailable online.)
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Wild Thing
Lord of the Flies is perhaps the best example of a book that forces readers to confront how wild we are. But there’s a whole corpus of books that accomplish the same thing. In The New Statesman, Erica Wagner writes about Melissa Harrison’s At Hawthorn Time and Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border.
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An Imagined Country
“The immigrant who arrives too late in life to adapt to his new country, but too early to survive on nostalgia for the old country, has to create a third, imagined country to live in.” Peter Pomerantsev writes for the London Review of Books about Brighton Beach, Russian immigrants and a “self-made America.” Pair with Matthew Wolfson‘s review of Yelena Akhtiorskaya‘s novel of Brighton Beach and Odessa, Panic in a Suitcase.
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A Heartbreaking Playlist of Staggering Sadness
Emma Straub’s super sad true Year In Reading entry had our eyes welling up just from its synopses, but now Ms. Straub’s put together an extremely sad playlist to keep you depressed through all of February.
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Defense Against Detractors
Recommended reading: Adele Waldman defends the purpose and form of the novel and balances David Shield‘s Reality Hunger against Anna Karenina.
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